Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town 9780691187792, 9780691128344, 0691128340, 2006014077

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Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town




Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town




Rogers Brubaker Margit Feischmidt Jon Fox Liana Grancea

princeton university press p r i n c e to n a n d ox f o r d

Copyright 2006 © by Rogers Brubaker Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town / Rogers Brubaker . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12834-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12834-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Hungarians—Romania—Cluj-Napoca—Ethnic identity. 2. Ethnicity—Romania—Cluj-Napoca. 3. Nationalism— Romania—Cluj-Napoca. 4. Group identity—Romania— Cluj-Napoca. I. Brubaker, Rogers, 1956– DR279.92.H8N38 2007 305.899'451104984—dc22 2006014077 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To our friends in Cluj




CONTENTS




List of Illustrations

xi

Preface, by Rogers Brubaker

xiii

Acknowledgments

xix

A Note on Names, Transcriptions, and Citations

xxi

List of Abbreviations Introduction

Part One: Nationalist Politics, Past and Present

xxiii 1 23

Chapter 1 The National Question in East Central Europe Empire and Nation Historical and Ethnocultural Claims in the Habsburg Lands Ethnic Intermixing and National Conflict Nationalist Claims and Counterclaims The National Question Recast World War II and After

27 30 34 37 39 43 50

Chapter 2 Transylvania as an Ethnic Borderland The Three Nationes 1848: The Emergence of Modern Nationalism Dualist Hungary as a Nationalizing State Nationalization Reversed War and Regime Change The Return to the “Nation”

56 57 60 63 68 76 82

Chapter 3 From Kolozsvár to Cluj-Napoca Kolozsvár in Nationalizing Hungary From Kolozsvár to Cluj Once Again in Hungary The Transition to Communist Rule The Romanianization of Cluj

89 91 97 101 105 109

viii

CONTENTS

Chapter 4 Cluj after Ceaus¸escu The Re-emergence of Ethnopolitical Contention The Struggle over Separate Schools in Cluj and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ Gheorghe Funar and the Nationalization of Public Space Reproducing Ethnicity: A Hungarian University in Cluj? Counting and Categorizing Conclusion

Part Two: Everyday Ethnicity

119 122 127 136 146 151 160 167

Chapter 5 Portraits Mari and Family Emilia Karcsi and Ági Ana Zsolt and Kati Claudiu and Lucian

173 173 176 178 182 184 188

Chapter 6 Preoccupations Getting By Everyday Coping Strategies Getting Ahead Accounting for Success Conclusion

191 191 197 201 205 206

Chapter 7 Categories Asymmetries Cues Doing Things with Categories Ethnic and Regional Categories Conclusion

207 211 217 224 231 237

Chapter 8 Languages Interaction with Strangers Private Talk in Public Places Language Choice in Mixed Company Language Mixing in Intraethnic Settings Conclusion

239 243 246 251 259 262

CONTENTS

ix

Chapter 9 Institutions Schools Churches Workplaces Associations Media Conclusion

265 269 277 283 287 290 295

Chapter 10 Mixings Disagreement and Conflict Avoidance Joking and Teasing Choices Conclusion

301 303 307 309 311 314

Chapter 11 Migrations “Aici nu se mai poate” Stigmatized Citizenship The Ambivalent Homeland

316 316 321 326

Chapter 12 Politics Funar DAHR Autonomy Status Law

333 339 343 346 350

Conclusion

357

Epilogue

365

Appendix A: An Example of the Interactional Emergence of Nationalism

375

Appendix B: A Note on Data

380

Bibliography

387

Index

429

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS




Plates follow page 134 Color Plates 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Hungarian Consulate on Union Square Union Square with Tricolor Flagpoles, Pennants, and Benches Tricolor Cluj Hungarian Commemorative Procession Tricolor Signs Hungarian National Colors Flyer Mobilizing Hungarians for 2002 Census “Romanian” and “Hungarian” City Map Covers Market Scenes Romanian National Holiday

Halftones 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Aerial Views of Union Square and Avram Iancu Square Installation and Unveiling of Plaque on Matthias Corvinus Statue, 1992 Avram Iancu Statue and Orthodox Cathedral Invoking the Roman Past Contending Plaques Tourists and Wedding Parties Posing in Front of National Monuments Unfinished Church Panoramic Views of Town Center and Outlying District Industrial Cluj Apartment Block Districts On the Fringes of the Market Posters Advertising Migration Opportunities Election Graffiti with Vlad the Impaler

xii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps Map 1. Map 2. Map 3. Map 4. Map 5. Map 6. Map 7.

Cluj Town Center East Central Europe, 1815 East Central Europe, 1910 East Central Europe, 1930 Hungary and Romania in the Twentieth Century Transylvania in Twentieth-Century Romania Cluj in the 1990s

2 31 33 44 69 77 114

Tables and Graphs Table 2.1. Transylvanian Population by Ethnic Identification, 1900–2002 Table 3.1. Cluj Population by Ethnic Identification, 1880–2002 Table 3.2. Cluj Population by Religious Affiliation, 1880–2002 Figure 3.3. The Growth of Cluj, 1880–2002 Table 4.1. Population of Taˆrgu-Mures¸ and Oradea by Ethnic Identification, 1910–2002

86 93 94 112 160

Photo credits: Jon Fox: 1a–b, 2a–f, 3a–l, 4a, 5a–c, 6a–b, 9a–d, 10, 13b, 14a–c, 15a–b, 16a, 16d, 17, 18a–b, 19a, 19c–d, 20a–d, 21b, 22a–c, 23; Rogers Brubaker: 9e; Adrian Dohotaru: 11a–b; Valentin Grancea: 19b, 21a; Iván D. Rohonyi: 12a–d, 13a; Sanda Tomulet¸iu: 4b–c.

PREFACE




This book examines the everyday workings of ethnicity and nationhood in a context marked by intense and intractable elite-level ethnopolitical conflict. The setting is the Transylvanian Romanian town of Cluj: a town with a long and occasionally glorious past, a decidedly more modest present, and an uncertain future. The book is based on extended collaborative fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2001. Yet while the research was conducted in Cluj, the book is not in the first instance a study of Cluj.1 It is conceived as a theoretically informed study of ethnicity and nationhood as they are represented and contested in the political sphere, and as they are expressed, enacted, and understood in everyday life. The book seeks to bridge conventional divisions of academic labor by studying both nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity, and by employing perspectives and analytical idioms seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutionalist and interactionist, political and experiential. The book has been long in the making. The intellectual trajectory that led me to Cluj, and eventually to this project, originated twenty years ago in my encounter with the rich German historical literature on nationhood and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. This was just before the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes and the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia made the “national question” newly salient throughout the region. In the first half of the 1990s, my empirical work focused on the large-scale configuration of nationalist politics in the region.2 At the same time, I was seeking to come to terms analytically with the elusive phenomenon of ethnicity. This effort at theoretical self-clarification prompted a series of essays that reflected critically on prevailing analytical vocabularies and sought to develop an analytical idiom that would break with the substantialist assumptions that encumber much work on ethnicity and nationalism, yet without simply invoking constructivist platitudes.3 In the course of this work, I began to experience a tension between my empirical studies, oriented to what Charles Tilly has called “big structures, large processes, [and] huge comparisons,” and my emerging sense that 1 “The locus of study,” as Clifford Geertz observed, “is not the object of study. Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages” (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 22). 2 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed. 3 Many of these essays have been collected in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.

xiv

PREFACE

ethnicity and nationalism could best be understood if studied from below as well as from above, in microanalytic as well as macroanalytic perspective. From a distance, it is all too easy to “see” bounded and homogeneous ethnic and national groups, to whom common interests, perceptions, intentions, and volition can be attributed. Up close, on the other hand, one risks losing sight of the larger contexts that shape experience and interaction. The study of large- and mid-scale structures and processes remains indispensable, but I came to believe that it must be complemented by research pitched at a level close to everyday experience if one is to avoid unwarranted assumptions of “groupness” and capture the way ethnicity actually “works.” It was at this juncture that I happened to visit Cluj in July 1994. My brief visit coincided with a moment of high political tension. Over vehement protests by leaders of the local Hungarian minority, the town’s extreme nationalist Romanian mayor was proceeding with plans for archaeological excavations in the historic town center, in the immediate vicinity of (and perhaps even threatening to displace) a central symbol of the town’s Hungarian past: a triumphalist equestrian statue of a celebrated Renaissance-era king of Hungary. In a calculated affront to Hungarian ethnonational sensibilities, the excavations were intended to highlight the prior Roman—and by extension, Romanian—presence on the site.4 As I came to learn more about the aggressive rhetoric and nationalizing initiatives of the mayor, of which the excavations in the central square were just one, I decided to return to Cluj the following summer for an exploratory research visit. I was accompanied by Jon Fox, a young American who had been living in Hungary for two years, and who was about to enter the Ph.D. program in sociology at UCLA. Jon had begun to work with me the previous year, gathering press materials in Hungary and interviewing Hungarian politicians in Transylvania, in preparation for what I then envisioned as a large-scale comparative study of Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine and Russian minorities in Soviet successor states. In Cluj, we did not pursue further contacts among the political or cultural elite, but instead sought out ordinary citizens. We were struck by the sharp disjuncture between the political dramas played out on the public stage over the preceding three years and the cares and concerns of ordinary Clujeni, many of whom were indifferent to or dismissive of nationalist politics. During this visit, Jon and I met Margit Feischmidt, a young Hungarian researcher who had grown up in Cluj and moved to Budapest to continue her studies. Having undertaken an anthropological study of ethnicity in a Transylvanian village, Margit was now embarking on a Ph.D. in 4

See chapter 4, pp. 141, 143–44.

PREFACE

xv

ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and had begun to study conflicts over the mayor’s efforts to nationalize the townscape in Cluj. Margit had originally intended to focus on the symbolic meanings attached to two statues, one “Romanian,” the other “Hungarian,” that had been focal points of public controversy. But she, too, had discovered that ordinary Clujeni—especially the younger generation, and those without university education—were largely indifferent to those symbolic meanings, and preoccupied with other matters; and she was therefore in the process of rethinking her project. Over the next few years, I continued to work with Jon, and began to collaborate with Margit as well.5 These twin collaborations proceeded initially along separate tracks, though the three of us met together on a few occasions. I did not at first envision a book on Cluj. I had dropped the idea of a comparative study of Hungarian and Russian minorities: such a study would have required a view from afar, and from above, while I was increasingly committed to the ethnographic study of ethnicity and nationhood (or “nationness”). Yet initially I continued to think in terms of a comparative study that would extend to other towns with substantial Hungarian populations in Transylvania and southern Slovakia; alongside our work in Cluj, we did preliminary research in Oradea and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ in Transylvania and in Kosˇice in Slovakia.6 I met Liana Grancea in the fall of 1998. Like Margit, Liana had grown up in Cluj. After completing university studies there, she had enrolled in the MA program in Nationalism Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, in which I was a visiting professor. A native speaker of Romanian, but (unusually for Clujeni of her generation) fluent in Hungarian as well, Liana had a keen interest in and eye for interactional detail, and she wrote her MA thesis on characteristic practices of mixed Romanian-Hungarian families in Cluj. She began to work with me in Cluj the following summer, and entered the Ph.D. program at UCLA in the fall.7 5 In the meantime, Jon and Margit were pursuing their graduate studies. Jon wrote his MA paper on Transylvanian Hungarian labor migration to Hungary (published as Fox, “National Identities on the Move”). His dissertation (“Nationhood without Nationalism”) addressed everyday nationness among Romanian and Hungarian university students in Cluj; parts have been published in Fox, “Missing the Mark,” and idem, “Consuming the Nation.” Margit’s dissertation focused on symbolic struggles and everyday culture in Cluj; it was published as Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung. We draw occasionally on data initially collected for these dissertations, and we refer occasionally to analyses presented in these works. But with small exceptions, the present book rests on a separate body of data, and develops a quite different argument. 6 Two other UCLA graduate students were involved in this preliminary research: Ca ˘ lin Goina in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ and Peter Stamatov in Kosˇice. 7 At UCLA, Liana was drawn to the microanalytic wing of the department; she is currently completing her dissertation in conversation analysis.

xvi

PREFACE

At this point, we had conducted over a hundred open-ended interviews in Cluj, undertaken sustained ethnographic observation, begun systematically collecting materials from the local Romanian- and Hungarian-language press, and even organized a survey. Yet in a sense we had only scratched the surface. Extending the investigation in comparable depth to several other towns—or even one more—would have required not only additional funding and much more time but also a fundamentally different type of collaborative research. My encounters with Jon, Margit, and Liana had been serendipitous; we had been drawn into collaborative work by shared sensibilities as well as shared interests. Broadening the scope would have required a more systematic and deliberate attempt to recruit people with appropriate forms of expertise; the close working relationships we had established could not have been reproduced on a wider canvas. Facing a choice between “widening” and “deepening,” I chose the latter, and I began to think about a book focused specifically on Cluj. We organized more than thirty informal group discussions; these allowed us to observe, in the context of relatively unstructured conversations, the manner in which and extent to which everyday cares and concerns were framed in ethnic terms. We conducted oral histories, examined marriage records, observed public holidays and the everyday uses of symbolically charged public spaces, studied the administration of the 2002 census, recorded everyday interactions in public places, and spent a great deal of time with a small set of Clujeni whom we chose as subjects of introductory “portraits.”8 Having limited the scope of our research, we also reconceptualized its nature. The initial impetus for a broad comparative study of Hungarian and Russian minorities had come from my interest in the dynamic relation between national minorities, the national (and often nationalizing) states in which they lived, and the external national “homelands,” or “kin states,” to which they belonged by ethnocultural affinity though not by legal citizenship. As we probed more deeply into the lived experience of ethnicity, this configuration receded into the background; it was the local political scene that was more immediately relevant as a backdrop to the everyday experience of ethnicity. Of course broader statewide and inter-state contexts frame and shape both local political struggles and the experience of ethnicity in everyday life in important ways; and we give sustained attention to these wider contexts in the first part of our book. But the receding comparative horizon and our deepening engagement with everyday ethnicity led us to a new understanding of our project. Our focus was no longer the Hungarian minority as such, in 8

For details, see appendix B, “A Note on Data.”

PREFACE

xvii

relation to the national state in which it was embedded and the external kin state to which it was related. It was rather the experience and enactment of ethnicity and nationness—Romanian and Hungarian—in everyday life, in a local context characterized by intense elite-level ethnopolitical struggles. I could not have undertaken this project on my own, or with any but this particular set of collaborators. All of us know both Romanian and Hungarian, and we have worked solely with data in those languages. But I am not at home enough in either language, or sensitive enough to conversational nuance, to be a skilled ethnographer. And though I spent several weeks in Cluj every summer from 1995 through 2001, I was unable to spend long continuous periods in the field. Having grown up in Cluj, Margit and Liana brought to the project not only native proficiency in Hungarian and Romanian but also rich local knowledge, disciplined by distance and professional training. And Jon’s extended stays in Cluj—a total of 21 months between 1995 and 2001, including one year devoted principally to his own dissertation research—provided the bulk of our ethnographic data.9 The four of us shared the same basic approach to the study of ethnicity and nationalism. Yet differences of background, temperament, and training did of course mean that we brought different perspectives to the project. These were not, in the first instance, political differences. Margit and Liana do not represent a kind of ethnopolitical “ticket-balancing,” with Margit embodying the “Hungarian” and Liana the “Romanian” view. At times, their differing linguistic and ethnonational socialization enabled them to detect and correct for biases in certain formulations. But differences of disciplinary formation, methodological orientation, interactional style, and intellectual interest were more important than differences in ethnonational identification in shaping the distinctive perspectives—and distinctive strengths—of my collaborators. These include Jon’s sensitivity to everyday manifestations of nationness, and his gift for participant observation; Margit’s anthropological training, and her keen appreciation for the symbolic and ritual aspects of ethnicity and nationalism; and Liana’s sharp eye—and ear—for interactional nuance, enhanced by her expertise in conversation analysis. Collaborative work always poses questions about writing; our fourfold collaboration made those questions especially complex. We wanted to write a unified, coherent book; this ruled out a segmentary division of labor, with different parts of the book written by different participants. We could perhaps have experimented with a polyvocal style of writing, preserving distinct authorial voices. But this would have distracted 9

My co-authors have been listed in alphabetic order on the title page.

xviii

PREFACE

attention from the substance of our analysis; and it would have risked artificially exaggerating differences in perspective. The single authorial voice that we have adopted no doubt flattens out some differences between us. But it also captures a key aspect of our collaboration: the manner in which sustained discussions led not to a sharpening or hardening of differences but, in innumerable ways large and small, to a mutual adjustment of views and a collaborative development and refinement of a shared perspective. Primary responsibility for writing (and full responsibility for revising) the manuscript between 2001 and 2005 has been my own. In this process, I was aided by rough drafts and initial sketches of many sections prepared by my collaborators; and we exhaustively—and sometimes exhaustingly—discussed successive versions of every chapter. The result is a text that, while written in a single voice, is authored, in a deeper sense, by all of us. Rogers Brubaker Los Angeles, December 2005

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




We have incurred many debts, personal, professional, and institutional, in the course of researching and writing this book; though we cannot acknowledge them all, it is a pleasure to acknowledge some. We are deeply grateful to a number of friends and colleagues, who gave generously of their time and read the manuscript with sympathetic yet critical eyes. We were fortunate enough to receive detailed comments on the entire manuscript from Zsuzsa Berend, Kanchan Chandra, Dan Chirot, Mitch Duneier, Bruce Grant, Chris Hann, Jeremy King, Gail Kligman, David Laitin, Mara Loveman, and Andy Thompson; and on substantial parts of the manuscript from Holly Case, Debra Friedman, Jitka Malecˇková, Veljko Vujacˇic´, and Zsuzsa Török. Even though we have not been able to follow all the good advice that they offered, the book is much the better as a result. For exceptionally generous institutional support, extending the “long lines of intellectual credit” (as Robert Merton called them) that made possible the decade-long incubation and maturation of this project, Rogers Brubaker is grateful to the MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the University of California supported periods of intensive work on the project; the United States Institute of Peace, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation, and the UCLA Academic Senate provided generous research support. The Fulbright New Century Scholars Program enabled Margit Feischmidt to spend four months in Los Angeles in 2003. Brubaker is grateful for having had the opportunity to teach regularly on a visiting basis in the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University in Budapest during the course of his work on this book. He has learned a great deal from the program’s remarkable students, including numerous students from Transylvania, Liana Grancea among them; and he would like to thank the director, Mária Kovács, and the program coordinator, Szabolcs Pogonyi. We would like to thank Ca˘lin Goina, Zsuzsa Plainer, and Andreea Moraru, who worked with Brubaker and Feischmidt on the Taˆrgu-Mures¸ project that we draw on in chapter 4, and Sherrill Stroschein, who shared her collection of articles from Népujság, the Hungarian newspaper in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. Thanks also to Nándor Bárdi, László Fosztó, István

xx

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Horváth, Zoltán Kántor, and Marius Laza˘r, who helped answer queries and pointed out relevant literature. At UCLA, Brubaker and Grancea had the privilege of studying conversation analysis with Emanuel Schegloff; this experience greatly enhanced our sensitivity to the interactional microdynamics of ethnicity. The book’s maps were drawn by Dirk Hansen. Paul Robert Magocsi graciously granted permission to base the historical maps on selected maps from his Historical Atlas of Central Europe (University of Washington Press, 2002), a key resource for anyone working on the region. For indispensable—and exceptionally capable—assistance during the project’s final stages, our warm thanks go to Linda Kim. We are grateful also to Elizabeth Lynn, who provided skillful and conscientious assistance at an earlier stage. At Princeton University Press, we greatly appreciate the strong support of Director Peter Dougherty and Editor Tim Sullivan for this project. At a moment when the scholarly monograph is an endangered species, we particularly appreciate their willingness to wager that a long and unabashedly scholarly book about an obscure East Central European town could nonetheless speak to a broad audience. We are also grateful to production editor Debbie Tegarden for skillfully shepherding the book through the production process on an unusually tight schedule. In Cluj, we benefitted greatly from the assistance of Sanda Tomulet¸iu, who moderated a number of group discussions and co-ordinated the transcription of interviews and group discussions; and from that of Éva Borbély and Ádám Biró, who assembled a comprehensive archive of articles from local, regional, and selected statewide newspapers, and helped in many other ways as well. For their generous help and hospitality, we would also like to thank Viorel Anastasoaie, István and Anamaria Bálint, Péter Bányai, Maria Bujor, Éva Horvát, Ferenc Kiss, Csilla Könczei, Júlia Krizsán, Flaviu and Ovidiu Ma˘t¸an-Dragoste, Nándor László Magyari, Eniko´´ Magyari-Vincze, Eugenia Orban, Paula and Cristian Os¸ ian, Carmen Pricopi, Ágnes Saszet, and Adrian Sucilea. Our debt— and heartfelt thanks—to the many other Clujeni who made this book possible is reflected in our dedication.

A NOTE ON NAMES, TRANSCRIPTIONS, AND CITATIONS




The town that is the subject of this book has been known officially as Cluj-Napoca since 1974, when “Napoca”—the name of the ancient Roman town that once stood on the site—was added to “Cluj” as a nationalist gesture.1 But the full name is seldom used outside of official contexts. We refer throughout simply to “Cluj” (pronounced klu¯zh), or to ¯ lo¯zhvar), which the town’s Hungarian name, Kolozsvár (pronounced KO we use when discussing the periods of Hungarian rule. (In discussing the medieval and early modern period, we refer also to the town’s German name, Klausenburg.) Residents of Cluj are called Clujeni (pronounced approximately klu¯ZHEN) in Romanian; we occasionally use the male and female singular forms Clujean and Clujeanca˘. When referring to other towns, we use the official name for the period under discussion; when we use two variants, we give the official name first. When Romanian and Hungarian versions of a term or expression are provided, the Romanian expression is given first. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from our data that feature more than one speaker are from group discussions (described in appendix B). In quotations from interviews and group discussions, ellipses in brackets mark omitted material; ellipses without brackets indicate a trail-off by the speaker; and a dash followed by a space indicates a cut-off. In quotations from group discussions, the symbol // marks the beginning of overlapping talk by two (or in a few cases more) participants. Citations in the footnotes are given by author (or editor) and (often abbreviated) title; full information is provided in the bibliography. Bibliographic information for census data, other official sources, and newspapers can be found at the beginning of the bibliography. 1

See chapter 3, pp. 109–10.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS




CHDC DAHR EU GRP HSAC NSF PRNU TCA TU OSCE

Cluj Hungarian Democratic Council Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania European Union Greater Romania Party Hungarian Student Association of Cluj National Salvation Front Party of Romanian National Unity Transylvanian Carpathian Association Technical University Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town





INTRODUCTION

Shortly after ten o’clock one morning in July 1997, a small truck pulled up in front of the Hungarian Consulate in the Transylvanian town of Cluj, Romania’s fifth-largest city and Transylvania’s unofficial capital. Between the third-story windows of the Consulate flew a red, white, and green Hungarian flag. Two days earlier, the Consulate had reopened for business after a nine-year hiatus. It had been shut down by the Romanian government in 1988 in response to growing public criticism, in gradually liberalizing late-communist Hungary, of the Ceaus¸escu dictatorship and its treatment of the country’s ethnoculturally Hungarian minority—one of the largest minorities in Eastern Europe, some 1.6 million people according to the census that was conducted in 1992, accounting for about 7 percent of the population of Romania and 20 percent of the population of Transylvania.1 Diplomatic relations had remained strained after the fall of Ceaus¸escu in December 1989, largely because of continuing frictions concerning the status of the Hungarian minority. But relations improved markedly in 1996: a liberal, pro-Western coalition government replaced a more nationalist government in Bucharest, while the socialist-liberal government that had come to power in Hungary in 1994 was more eager to cultivate good relations with Romania than the more nationalist governments that preceded (and followed) it. The reopening of the Consulate was one fruit of that rapprochement. In Cluj, however, outspoken nationalist Gheorghe Funar, well known for his inflammatory rhetoric, confrontational style, and anti-Hungarian animus, had just been elected to a second term as mayor. Funar objected vociferously to the reopening of the Consulate, situated in a prime location on the north side of the town’s main square (map 1). For the mayor, it was already a problem that the architecture of the square evoked the town’s Habsburg and Hungarian past.2 The square is dominated by the 1 Kürti, The Remote Borderland, 129–30; Iordachi, “The Anatomy of a Historical Conflict,” chapter III.b.4. Romania’s 2002 census recorded substantially fewer ethnic Hungarians, about 1.43 million; on the decline, see this volume, chapter 4 (pp. 158–59) and the epilogue. 2 Cluj was a predominantly Hungarian-speaking city from the seventeenth through the midtwentieth century. Transylvania had long been part of the historic Kingdom of Hungary, and it was an integral part of the nationalizing Hungarian state that enjoyed nearly complete independence in domestic matters during the last half-century of Habsburg rule, from 1867 to 1918. We discuss these historical contexts in chapters 2 and 3.

INTRODUCTION

3

massive bulk and stately spire of the austere late Gothic Church of Saint Michael, and by the adjacent equestrian statue of the Renaissance-era king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus. Both church and statue can be seen as “Hungarian”: almost all parishioners of the church are Hungarian, and the statue is an early twentieth-century monument to Hungarian nationalism.3 When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the town (along with the rest of Transylvania) had become part of Romania, but Hungarians remained a local majority until the 1950s, and the central square could still be seen as having retained a “Hungarian” atmosphere. In an effort to neutralize these Hungarian associations, and to assert the Romanian character of the square, Funar had undertaken a variety of initiatives since coming to office in 1992.4 He had reinstalled a 1930sera plaque on the base of the statue, presenting a Romanian nationalist view of Matthias Corvinus. He had sponsored archaeological excavations in the square, designed to reveal Roman ruins and thereby to assert Romanian priority in Cluj (by virtue of the putative direct link between ancient Romans and modern Romanians). He had threatened to move the equestrian statue, or to remove it (“for restoration”). He had erected three towering flagpoles, flying Romanian flags, on either side of the equestrian monument, and strung pennants with Romanian national colors—red, yellow, and blue—between them. Later he would replace the white benches in the square with new ones painted in the Romanian colors. In the context of these ongoing efforts to “nationalize” the symbolically charged square, the prospect of a Hungarian Consulate functioning, and a Hungarian flag flying, was taken as a provocation by Funar. He issued a series of statements denouncing the Consulate, and warned that he would refuse to permit its opening. When it opened nonetheless, he boycotted the opening ceremony, attended by the foreign ministers of Hungary and Romania. This was the setting on the July morning when the truck pulled up in front of the Consulate. Several men got out of the truck, and placed an extendable ladder against the side of the building. As passers-by looked on, one man climbed the ladder and removed the offending flag from its place next to the third-story window. In severely divided societies, symbolic provocations such as this have served as flashpoints for ethnic or nationalist violence.5 In other contexts, 3 Religion and ethnicity are closely correlated in Transylvania: Orthodox and Greek Catholics are overwhelmingly Romanian, Calvinists overwhelmingly Hungarian, and Roman Catholics in their large majority Hungarian. On the ethnonational symbolism of the statue and its vicissitudes under differing regimes, see chapter 3, pp. 96–97, 100, 108. 4 These and other nationalizing initiatives are discussed in chapter 4, pp. 136–46; they are also documented in the color plates and halftones. 5 On the role of well-defined “rituals of provocation” in Hindu-Muslim violence in South Asia, see Gaborieau, “From Al-Beruni to Jinnah.”

4

INTRODUCTION

too, such provocations have generated outrage and spontaneous or organized protests. Yet the theft of the flag did not provoke so much as a demonstration or the signing of petitions in Cluj. The event featured prominently in the next day’s Hungarian newspaper; but the town’s Hungarian residents, comprising about a fifth of the population, were not particularly exercised about it. Though some expressed outrage, others would snort derisively, make faces, and roll their eyes, as if to say, “What did you expect?” or “There he goes again.” The episode was not represented as a desecration of a sacred national symbol; it was just another one of Funar’s provocations, to which Hungarians had become accustomed over the preceding five years. It was discussed in the idiom of farce, not that of sacred drama. The perpetrators were arrested (the police being controlled not by the municipality, but by the county, whose officials depend, in turn, on the central government); and though Funar characterized them as patriots and proposed to make them honorary citizens of Cluj, the flag was duly restored to its place, where it has remained undisturbed ever since.6 This small incident points to a larger set of concerns. The theft of the flag was not an isolated incident; as indicated above, it was part of a broader politics of symbolic nationalization pursued by Mayor Funar. And Funar himself was not simply a local eccentric, but a leading figure in statewide nationalist politics.7 Nor was Funar’s the only nationalist show in town. Cluj was (and remains) the headquarters of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania (DAHR), at once an umbrella organization claiming to represent the Hungarian minority and a statewide political party, committed to a far-reaching form of territorial and cultural autonomy for Hungarians. From the other side of Romania’s western border, Hungary has made claims to protect the rights of “its” coethnics in Romania and elsewhere, and it has been represented in Romanian nationalist rhetoric as continuing to harbor irredentist aspirations. Local ethnopolitical struggles have been intertwined with statewide and interstate nationalist conflicts. A number of elements for an explosive and potentially violent ethnonational conflict seemed to be united in Cluj after the fall of Ceaus¸escu: a radically nationalist and vitriolically anti-Hungarian mayor between 1992 and 2004; a well-organized, well-financed, and strongly nationalist 6 See plate 1. Our account is based on the reporting in Szabadság, July 26 through August 6, 1997, and on the July 31 and August 1, 1997, daily press reports compiled by the DAHR from statewide and local Romanian and Hungarian language papers (archived at http://www .hhrf.org/rmdsz/sajtofigyelo/). 7 Funar was chairman of the extreme nationalist Party of Romanian National Unity from 1992 to 1997 and has been general secretary of the equally nationalist Greater Romania Party since 1998.

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Hungarian political party; nationalist Romanian- and Hungarianlanguage print and broadcast media; and bitter political conflicts over statues, plaques, flags, and other national emblems and insignia. To this could be added a series of equally inauspicious historical and contextual factors: the pulverization of civil society and heavy-handed official nationalism bequeathed by the Ceaus¸escu regime; the dismal economic situation of postcommunist Romania, and the dislocations and disillusionment occasioned by the “transition”; the long-standing nationalist struggle in and over Transylvania, leading to four changes in sovereignty since the mid-nineteenth century, the most recent of which—in 1940 and 1944—remain within living memory of the older generation; the violent dissolution and prolonged agony of Yugoslavia (with which both Romania and Hungary share a border); and, closer at hand, the episode of bloody street fighting between Hungarians and Romanians in March 1990 in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, just 100 kilometers to the east of Cluj.8 Yet Clujeni responded on the whole with equanimity and detachment, indeed with considerable indifference, to the nationalist rhetoric that has saturated public discourse. Despite initial alarm about Mayor Funar’s hypernationalist rhetoric and harshly anti-Hungarian pronouncements, local Hungarians came to treat the mayor’s symbolic provocations with scorn, derision, and in some cases even amusement, rather than alarm, and to speak of the mayor himself as “crazy” or “sick” rather than dangerous. And Romanians did not seem to be taking seriously his alarmist pronouncements—his characterization of the DAHR as a “terrorist organization,” for example, or his assertion that Transylvanian Hungarians were secretly collecting weapons, forming paramilitary detachments, and planning an attack on Romanians.9 With few and transitory exceptions, Clujeni were not afraid; they were not concerned that what happened in Yugoslavia—or in Taˆrgu-Mures¸—might happen in Cluj.10 The absence of such fear is telling, especially since the previous regime was notorious for fostering fear, suspicion, and mistrust. Equally striking was the weakness of popular nationalist mobilization and the absence of serious ethnic tension in everyday life. A handful of substantial demonstrations marked the first year and a half of Funar’s tenure, but thereafter collective action was infrequent and We discuss this episode of violent conflict in chapter 4, pp. 127–36. See chapter 4, pp. 136–38, 144–46. 10 Fear is crucial to the social mechanisms and cultural meanings through which violence originates and spreads. See for example Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 175–84, emphasizing political psychology; Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” transposing the analysis of the “security dilemma” from the domain of inter-state relations to that of intergroup relations; Lake and Rothchild, “Containing Fear,” highlighting strategic interaction; and T. Hansen, “Recuperating Masculinity,” in a more culturalist vein. For a review, see Brubaker and Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” 441–43. 8 9

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INTRODUCTION

weak.11 An outside observer, reading the local newspapers, Hungarian or Romanian, might well get the impression that there were serious tensions between “the Hungarians” and “the Romanians.” And a researcher coming to town for a brief visit to study ethnopolitical contention, and meeting with representatives of the mayor’s office, the DAHR, local NGOs, and journalists, might have had that impression confirmed. Yet had that researcher stayed longer and settled into the rhythms of everyday life, she would have been hard-pressed to find evidence of that tension among ordinary Clujeni. She would have found plenty of people in the streets, at least in the crowded town center, but they would have been shopping, or cramming the buses and trams on their way to work, or sunning themselves on the benches in the main squares, heedless of the Romanian national colors on which, courtesy of the mayor, they were sitting. She might well have heard people complaining, but Romanians and Hungarians would most likely have been complaining about the same things—high prices, worthless pensions, and self-serving politicians—in the same, non-ethnicized way. She would not have seen people marching on City Hall, or assembling for demonstrations or protest meetings. This, then, is one set of observations from which we start. For twelve years, Cluj was a turbulent site of nationalist politics, Hungarian as well as Romanian. Yet it was far from a “seething cauldron,” on the verge of boiling over, or a “tinderbox” that a single careless spark could ignite— to mention just two images invoked by pundits writing about ethnic and nationalist conflict.12 People were not afraid, despite attempts to frighten them; they did not take to the streets, despite attempts to mobilize them. Heated nationalist rhetoric evoked only muted popular response. The tepid response of ordinary Clujeni to fervent ethnonational rhetoric does not mean that ethnicity and nationhood have little meaning outside the political realm. Social life is powerfully, though unevenly, structured along ethnic lines; and ethnic and national categories are part of the taken-for-granted framework of social and political experience. Ethnicity and nationhood (or “nationness”) “happen” every day in Cluj, even if many such happenings are invisible or uninteresting to students of collective action or ethnic violence. They are embodied and expressed not only in political claims and nationalist rhetoric but in everyday encounters, practical categories, commonsense knowledge, cultural idioms, cog11 We discuss the protests, which focused on perceived threats posed by Funar’s nationalizing initiatives to the town’s central “Hungarian” symbol, the equestrian statue of Matthias Corvinus on the main square, in chapter 4, pp. 142–44. 12 On the image of the seething cauldron, see Brubaker, “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism”; Bowen, “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict.”

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nitive schemas, mental maps, interactional cues, discursive frames, organizational routines, social networks, and institutional forms. We examine such everyday embodiments and expressions as a way of addressing basic questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works.13 We are prompted to raise these elementary—and seemingly naïve— questions by our dissatisfaction with prevailing analytical vocabularies and theoretical stances in the study of ethnicity and nationalism. Theorizing in this domain has been dominated for a quarter-century by constructivist approaches. The idea of social or cultural construction has been an exceptionally fertile metaphor; it has inspired a large and important body of work. Yet constructivism has grown complacent, even clichéd, with success. Once a bracing challenge to the conventional wisdom, it has become the conventional wisdom; once an insurgent idiom, it has become the epitome of academic respectability. With respectability has come routinization. Familiar constructivist formulae have become well-worn gestures that one reads (and writes) virtually automatically. Discussions of ethnic and national identity, for example, come predictably packaged with standard sets of qualifiers, indicating that such identities are multiple, unstable, contingent, contested, fragmented, constructed, negotiated, and so on. The problem is not that this (or the notion of social construction in general) is wrong. It is rather too obviously right, too readily taken for granted, to generate the friction, force, and freshness needed to push arguments further and generate new insights. That ethnicity and nationhood are constructed is a commonplace; how they are constructed is seldom specified in detail.14 Constructivism coexists uneasily in the literature—and often even in individual works—with a decidedly nonconstructivist “groupism.” By this we mean the tendency to take internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups—here ethnic groups and nations—as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis. Grounded in what Pierre Bourdieu called “our primary inclination to think the social world in a substantialist manner,”15 this tendency to reify groups has proved surprisingly robust. 13 On “nationness,” see Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins. The term itself was introduced by B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 3. This and the next few paragraphs draw on formulations in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups. 14 Others, too, have voiced dissatisfaction with the current state of constructivist theorizing on ethnicity and have sought to make constructivist research more rigorous and cumulative. See for example Fearon and Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity”; Lustick, “Agent-based Modeling and Constructivist Identity Theory”; Gil-White, “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain?”; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition”; Chandra, ed., Ethnicity, Politics and Economics. 15 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 228.

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INTRODUCTION

Despite a quarter-century of constructivist theorizing—or perhaps precisely because constructivism has lost its intellectual edge—ethnic groups continue to be understood as entities and cast as actors. Everyday talk, policy analysis, media reports, and even much ostensibly constructivist academic writing routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial, and national conflict as the struggles “of” ethnic groups, races, and nations. Somehow, when we talk about ethnicity, and even more when we talk about ethnic conflict, we almost automatically find ourselves talking about ethnic groups.16 This unhappy marriage of clichéd constructivism and engrained groupism has encumbered the study of ethnicity and nationalism with an analytical vocabulary that is too often flat and undifferentiated. To give the constructivist project renewed analytical purchase, we have sought to develop an analytical vocabulary for talking about ethnicity without (necessarily) talking about ethnic groups; we seek to show how ethnicity works—in politics and in everyday life—without automatically taking ethnic groups as our unit of analysis. Constructivist accounts of ethnicity have flourished in the United States in particular in recent years; the fluidity of the American ethnic landscape has no doubt contributed to their popularity.17 At the same time, the “differentialist” turn in American social and political thought and the institutionalization of multiculturalist policies and practices have provided support for groupist ways of thinking, talking, and framing claims. In the American context, such groupism is an obvious target for constructivist criticism. It is easy enough, for example, to highlight the enormous cultural, social, and economic heterogeneity of each of the “groups” taken to constitute the canonical “ethnoracial pentagon”— African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.18 It is only a short step further to argue that, with the partial exception of African Americans, these are not groups at all but categories, backed by political entrepreneurs and entrenched in governmental and other organizational routines of social counting and accounting. The case we address—drawn from a region with more stable, deeply rooted, and intensely politicized ethnic and national identifications, and from a town that has experienced continuous and often embittered elitelevel ethnopolitical conflict since the fall of communism—would seem 16 As Domínguez, People as Subject, People as Object, 38–39 points out, this is true even of much scholarship by researchers who are aware of the socially constructed nature of ethnicity. 17 On the permeability of ethnic boundaries in the United States, see for example Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity”; Heisler, “Ethnicity and Ethnic Relations in the Modern West” (on “ethnic nominalism”); Waters, Ethnic Options. 18 On the “ethnoracial pentagon,” see Hollinger, Postethnic America, 8f., 23ff., a subtle and influential critique of rigid forms of ethnoracial pluralism and a plea for a more cosmopolitan understanding of diversity.

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to be more resistant to constructivist analysis. Talk about the fluidity, contingency, and perpetual negotiation and renegotiation of identities can appear frivolous or naïve in this context, and the critique of groupism might seem misplaced. If ethnic and national boundaries are harder, more durable, and more constraining in Eastern Europe than in the United States, it might be asked, then why shouldn’t one take ethnic and national groups as units of analysis?19 Cluj is thus a challenging—and at first glance unlikely—setting for an effort to develop a more cogently constructivist and nongroupist account of ethnicity and nationalism. Yet here, too, it is problematic to render ethnopolitical conflict—and, a fortiori, everyday ethnicity—in groupist terms. A groupist reading conflates groups with the organizations that claim to speak and act in their name; obscures the generally low, though fluctuating, degree of “groupness” in this setting; accepts, at least tacitly, the claims of nationalist politicians to speak for the groups they claim to represent; and neglects the everyday contexts in which ethnic and national categories take on meaning and the processes through which ethnicity actually “works” in everyday life. More generally, to cast ethnopolitical conflict in groupist terms is to take vernacular understandings—the substantialist notions of ethnicity and nationhood that are central to nationalist politics and to commonsense “folk sociology” in Cluj and elsewhere—as analytic categories. It is to work with a “preconstructed” commonsense object of analysis instead of constructing that object through a break with commonsense understandings.20 It is to accept the implicit social ontology that underlies ethnopolitical and nationalist rhetoric: the treatment of internally homogeneous and externally bounded ethnic groups and nations as basic building blocks of social reality.21 19 There has of course been a good deal of constructivist work on ethnicity and nationalism in Eastern Europe. But constructivism lacks the taken-for-granted status in Eastern Europe—and among Eastern Europeanists—that it has in the United States. And casual, clichéd constructivism has come in for criticism, much of it justified. For sophisticated statements of skepticism about the appropriateness of characteristically American constructivist language for the analysis of ethnicity and nationalism in Eastern Europe, see for example Sardamov, “Facing South Slav Ethnocentrism”; Luczewski, “What Remains for Nationalism Studies?” 20 On the “trap of the preconstructed object,” see Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 231; more generally, on object construction in the social sciences through a break with commonsense notions and vernacular categories, see 220–22, 227–29, 235–38, 247. On “folk sociology,” see Hirschfeld, Race in the Making, 115ff., 190. Breaking with commonsense notions in the construction of one’s object of analysis and analytic categories, of course, does not mean neglecting vernacular representations and participants’ understandings. Vernacular representations of ethnicity are part of what we seek to explain; but they are not what we explain things with. They belong to our data, not to our analytical tools. 21 To the extent that such essentialist understandings of ethnicity and nationhood are widely held, readily activated, and experientially salient in a given setting, of course, they can take on a psychological and social power that constructivist observers neglect at their peril. But the pervasive relevance, experiential centrality, and essentializing construal of ethnic and national categories cannot be assumed; it must be demonstrated.

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INTRODUCTION

Social science scholarship has long been closely entwined with nationalist politics. All social science research, to be sure, is closely bound up with the objects of its analysis, and can contribute to producing, reproducing, or transforming what it studies; but the interpenetration of the social sciences and nationalist discourse has been particularly intimate. In an overt manner, history, political science, geography, folklore, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, law, economics, and other disciplines have been enlisted to legitimate national claims (and discredit competing claims). But there are also more subtle forms of complicity. As anthropologist Richard Handler has observed, scholars writing about nationalism tend to slip unwittingly into an analytical language that embodies characteristically nationalist assumptions about the boundedness, homogeneity, and historical continuity of “the nation.”22 We have tried to avoid this hazard through a strategy of analytical disaggregation. This does not mean focusing on individuals instead of groups. Our critique of groupism and commitment to disaggregation entail neither an ontological nor a methodological individualism.23 The choice is not between a universalist, individualist analytical idiom and an identitarian, groupist one; this is a false opposition.24 The alternative to a substantialist understanding of ethnic groups and nations as bounded entities, collective individuals, and self-conscious actors is not an asocial idiom of individual choice, but rather a relational, processual, and dynamic understanding of ethnicity and “nation.”25 In analyzing nationalist politics, past and present, in Cluj and the wider region, we focus on the interplay of national claims and counter22 As a result, Handler concludes, much scholarship on nationalism “is to some extent a rationalization of ‘native’ ideology” (Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, 8); see also the more extended discussion in idem, “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis.” A similar observation could be made about scholarship on ethnicity. 23 A substantial literature in political science and other fields has developed rational choice, game-theoretic, and other individualist approaches to ethnicity and nationalism. See for example Hardin, One for All; Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity; Congleton, “Ethnic Clubs, Ethnic Conflict, and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism”; McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson, “Shared Norms Can Lead to the Evolution of Ethnic Markers”; and for an approach combining formal modeling of individual choices with historical and political analysis, see Laitin, “National Revivals and Violence” and “Marginality: A Microperspective.” 24 For an exchange on this point, see Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’ ”; Calhoun, “Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary”; Brubaker, “Neither Individualism nor ‘Groupism’ ”; and Calhoun, “The Variability of Belonging.” Although the language of bounded groups and that of individual choice might seem antithetical, they are in fact closely related, for groupism is itself a kind of individualism, in a double sense, treating groups as collective individuals, and as collections of individuals (Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 33; Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, 32, 39–47; Calhoun, Nationalism, 42ff.). 25 The priority of relations over substances—whether individuals or groups—was a major theme of the methodological and epistemological position developed by Pierre Bourdieu, drawing on the work of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. See for example Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 15–16. An accessible statement by Cassirer is found in “The Influence of Language.”

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claims, on the shifting discursive and political fields within which such claims and counterclaims are embedded, and on the dynamics of nationalizing projects and processes, without reifying “the nation”— Romanian or Hungarian—or treating “the Romanians” or “the Hungarians” as the protagonists of national struggles. Similarly, in analyzing everyday ethnicity, we focus on cues, identifications, languages, institutions, networks, and interactions, without assuming that everyday experience is pervasively organized by strong ethnic “identities.”26 Central to our analysis of both nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity is the distinction between categories and groups. This is of course not a new distinction; but it is too often forgotten. If by “group” we mean a mutually interacting, mutually recognizing collectivity with a sense of solidarity, corporate identity, and capacity for concerted action, or even if we adopt a less exigent understanding of group, it should be clear that a category is not a group; it is at best a potential basis for group-formation or “groupness.”27 By distinguishing consistently between categories and groups, we can problematize—rather than presume—the relation between them. We can ask about the degree of groupness associated with a particular category in a particular setting, and about the political, social, cultural, and psychological processes through which categories get invested with varying degrees of groupness. Taking categories rather than groups as a point of departure has consequences for the sorts of questions one asks. Starting with groups, one is led to ask what groups want, demand, or aspire toward; how they think of themselves and others; and how they act in relation to other groups. One is led almost automatically by the substantialist language to attribute identity, agency, interests, and will to groups. Starting with categories, by contrast, invites us to focus on processes and relations rather than substances. It invites us to specify how people and organizations do things with ethnic and national categories, and how such categories, in turn, channel social interaction and organize commonsense knowledge and judgments.28 It invites us to analyze the organizational and discursive careers of categories—the processes through which they become 26 For a critical analysis of the overburdened and ambiguous notion of identity, see Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity.’ ” 27 This and the next paragraph draw on formulations in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, chapter 1. On categories and groups, see Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, 1:41, 401; Handelman, “The Organization of Ethnicity”; McKay and Lewins, “Ethnicity and the Ethnic Group”; Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 53ff. A similar point was made in different terms by Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 307 (the passage is unfortunately obscured in the English translation; cf. Economy and Society, 389). On “groupness,” see Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, 62ff. Further pertinent literature is cited in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, chapters 1–3. 28 “Doing things with categories” includes limiting access to scarce resources or particular domains of activity by excluding categorically distinguished outsiders (Weber, Economy and

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INTRODUCTION

institutionalized and entrenched in administrative routines and embedded in culturally powerful and symbolically resonant myths, memories, and narratives.29 It invites us to study the politics of categories: from above, the ways in which categories are proposed, propagated, imposed, institutionalized, discursively articulated, organizationally entrenched, and generally embedded in multifarious forms of “governmentality”;30 and from below, the “micropolitics” of categories, the ways in which the categorized appropriate, internalize, subvert, evade, or transform the categories that are imposed on them. It invites us to ask how, why, and in what contexts ethnic categories are used—or not used—to make sense of problems and predicaments, to articulate affinities and affiliations, to identify commonalities and connections, to frame stories and selfunderstandings.31 Although we distance ourselves from the notion that “the Hungarians” and “the Romanians” constitute distinct, bounded groups in Cluj (or elsewhere), we do sometimes refer in a generalizing manner to “Hungarians” and “Romanians.” These designations have for us a purely aggregative meaning. They refer not to solidary or bounded groups but to sets of category members, specifically to those persons who, if asked their ethnicity or ethnic nationality, would identify themselves as Hungarian or Romanian.32 That they would identify themselves in this way, in response to this question, does not imply anything about the salience of this ethnonational self-identification in relation to the myriad other self- and other-ascribed identifications that may be relevant in particular contexts.33 Nonetheless, it is useful to refer to “Hungarians” and “Romanians” in this aggregative sense, not only as a means of avoiding cumbersome circumlocution, but also because members of these categories differ from one another, on average, in various ways that are relevant for Society, 43ff.; Barth, “Introduction”). It also includes more mundane actions such as using ethnic categories to identify or classify oneself or others or to make sense of the social world (see for example Moerman, “Accomplishing Ethnicity”; Levine, “Reconstructing Ethnicity”; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition”). 29 On the organizational entrenchment of “categorical inequality,” see Tilly, Durable Inequality. On myths, memories, and symbols, see Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism; A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. 30 See for example Washington, “Principles of Racial Taxonomy.” 31 Categories figure centrally throughout this book; the most sustained discussion can be found in chapter 7. 32 Similarly, when we characterize certain nationalist claims as “Hungarian” or “Romanian” claims, we do not mean that these are claims of “the Hungarians” or “the Romanians,” considered as a bounded group; we mean, rather, that these are claims advanced in the name of “the Hungarians” or “the Romanians.” On speaking “in the name of the nation,” see Brubaker, “In the Name of the Nation.” 33 We explore the question of salience in Part Two, treating different facets of the question in chapters 6–10. For a review of work that highlights the variable salience of ethnicity, see Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity.”

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our study. Crucially, ethnicity is generally much more salient for Hungarians than for Romanians; and Hungarians and Romanians tend to hold differing views on a number of contentious ethnopolitical issues. These and other ways in which the categories “Hungarian” and “Romanian” matter, however, tell us nothing in and of themselves about the degree of groupness associated with those categories. Nationhood and nationalism, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, are “dual phenomena”: they are “constructed essentially from above,” yet they “cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people.” The disjuncture between heated nationalist rhetoric and muted popular response in postcommunist Cluj makes Hobsbawm’s observation all the more pertinent. Yet studies of nationalism have seldom integrated the two perspectives. One reason for this is suggested by Hobsbawm himself: [The] view from below, i.e., the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover. . . . First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters. Second . . . we cannot assume that for most people national identification—when it exists—excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being. . . . Thirdly, national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods. It is this area, Hobsbawm concludes, “in which thinking and research are most urgently needed today.”34 We take up Hobsbawm’s challenge in this book, analyzing nationhood and nationalism from below as well as from above. Our study is organized around this dual perspective. In Part One, we analyze nationalist politics “from above,” situating the postcommunist resurgence of politicized ethnicity in Cluj in a nested series of historical contexts. We examine in succession East Central Europe, where the “national question” came to dominate political life from the late-nineteenth through the midtwentieth century; Transylvania, located since the mid-nineteenth century between rival national claims and competing nationalist projects; and Cluj itself, the symbolic center of Transylvania, central to the 34

Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 10–11.

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INTRODUCTION

national imaginations and nationalist claims of Hungarians and Romanians alike. We then delineate the pattern of nationalist contention in Cluj since the fall of Ceaus¸escu, focusing on the demands for a separate Hungarian school system, the symbolic struggles over the nationalization of public space, and the politics of counting and categorizing. In Part Two, we shift our angle of vision and adopt the view from below, turning our attention from nationalist politics to everyday ethnicity. By counterposing “nationalist politics” and “everyday ethnicity,” we do not intend to signal a sharp distinction between nationalism and ethnicity. Ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious motifs are central to nationalist politics, as are national motifs to the quotidian experience of ethnicity. We understand ethnicity and nationalism as comprising a single broad family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization, and political contestation. “Ethnicity” is the more inclusive term, embracing much (but not all) of what we mean by nationhood and nationalism, and much else besides (as suggested by the terms “ethnoracial,” “ethnoreligious,” “ethnoregional,” “ethnolinguistic,” and “ethnocultural”). The specificity of nationalism (and of “nation” as a form of imagined community) is that, unlike many forms of politicized ethnicity, it involves claims of some sort to autonomy or independence. And unlike those forms of ethnicity that are generated by migration, “nation” is ordinarily imagined as grounded in a particular territory.35 Nationhood and nationality are not, however, necessarily understood as congruent with state and citizenship. This point needs to be underscored, since “nation” and “state,” “nationality” and “citizenship” are often used interchangeably in the United States and some Western European contexts. In Central and Eastern Europe, in contrast, “nation” is often imagined in ways that cut across the boundaries of state and citizenship. Thus to consider oneself Hungarian in Transylvania is to understand oneself as belonging to a Hungarian ethnocultural nation (defined by speaking Hungarian as one’s native language) that encompasses persons with several different citizenships, living not only in Hungary but in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine. The Romanian ethnocultural nation can also be understood to include Romanian-speaking citizens of Moldova, Ukraine, and other neighboring states.36 Calling this kind of 35 On the relation between ethnicity and nationalism, see A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations; Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism; Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity; Calhoun, “Nationalism and Ethnicity.” 36 This understanding of a transborder Romanian ethnocultural nation is contested by some political leaders in Moldova, who assert that the Moldovan nation—and even the Moldovan language—differ from Romanian. This is a reminder that nationhood is an imagined community and a political claim, not an ethnodemographic fact. On the politics of identity in post-Soviet Moldova, see King, The Moldovans; Iordachi, “Dual Citizenship and Policies Toward Kin Minorities.”

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self-understanding “ethnic” risks obscuring the sense of belonging to a state-transcending “nation,” and the distinctive political claims that often follow from that sense; yet calling it “national” risks misunderstanding, given the very different meaning of this term in the North American context. Our usage has generally been to speak of nationhood and nationalism when discussing political claims, and of ethnicity when discussing everyday practices and self-understandings, though we do not adhere rigidly to this distinction. We are concerned in Part Two with the multifarious ways in which ethnicity and nationhood matter, when they do matter, in the everyday lives of ordinary people. The caveat is important; for the cares and concerns of ordinary people, as Hobsbawm reminds us, are “not necessarily national and still less nationalist.”37 We do not assume the salience or significance of ethnicity and nationhood; we seek rather to discover and specify when, where, and how they become salient or significant. Ethnicity is not a thing, not a substance; it is an interpretive prism, a way of making sense of the social world.38 And it is always only one among many such interpretive frames.39 Everyday ethnicity cannot therefore be studied as a self-subsistent domain. Ethnicized ways of experiencing and interpreting the social world can only be studied alongside a range of alternative, non-ethnicized ways of seeing and being. To study ethnicity alone is to impose ethnicity as an analytical frame of reference where it might not be warranted; it is to risk adopting an overethnicized view of social experience. “If one goes out to look for ethnicity,” wrote anthropologist Thomas Eriksen, “one will ‘find’ it and thereby contribute to constructing it.” To study ethnicity without inadvertently contributing to its reproduction, it is necessary to situate ethnicity in the context of “that which is not ethnic.”40 Our research strategy, accordingly, was an indirect one. In informal group discussions, interviews, and extended participant observation— the main sources of our data—we avoided asking directly about ethnicity, or signaling a special interest in ethnicity.41 We sought instead to observe ethnicity, as far as possible, in the ebb and flow of ordinary social life. We talked with Clujeni about their everyday problems and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 10. Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition.” 39 This is often forgotten: discussions of ethnic categorization are often concerned with the complexities of how people are classified in racial or ethnic terms, while ignoring the question of how much or whether they are so classified. 40 Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 161 and, more generally, chapter 8; cf. Banks, Ethnicity, 186, 189. From the perspective of conversation analysis, Schegloff (“Whose Text, Whose Context?”) has argued eloquently against interpretations of data that impose the categories that are of interest to the analyst without evidence that those categories matter to the participants. 41 See appendix B, “A Note on Data.” 37 38

16

INTRODUCTION

preoccupations—raising children, paying bills, celebrating family milestones, planning for an uncertain future. We listened to their stories and anecdotes, to their complaints and frustrations, to the ways they talked with—and about—friends, neighbors, co-workers, fellow Clujeni, people from different regions of Romania, and citizens of other countries. We noted the categories they used to describe and explain the social world, to express pride or indignation, to formulate excuses or justifications, or to make sense of good or ill fortune. We tried to reconstruct the commonsense knowledge of the social world—the folk sociology—that informed everyday explanations for who gets ahead, who falls behind, and why. We observed how people talked about politics and politicians—when they talked about them at all. We attended not only to what they said, but to how they said it; not only to matter, but to manner: serious, ironic, playful, detached, moralizing, and so on. We observed routine encounters in public, and took part in ordinary social interaction among family and friends. We noted what languages were spoken in what settings, what cues triggered the use of a particular language, and how conversation sometimes shifted from one language to another. Our aim was to observe when, how, and in what settings ethnicity “happened” in the course of ordinary daily routines. Of course everyday life is not sealed off from the wider world; it does not transpire in a political, economic, or cultural vacuum. The discourse of fractious nationalist politics—at local, statewide, and international levels—filters into everyday life, and is sometimes absorbed, in fragmentary fashion, into everyday ways of thinking and talking. And the experience of ethnicity is pervasively structured by the foundational political inequality that is intrinsic to the nation-state. Our interest is not in everyday life as such, construed as an imaginary realm of pure sociability. We are interested rather in the relation— sometimes palpable and immediate, more often indirect and attenuated— between contentious nationalist politics, as transmitted and amplified by the media, and the experience of ethnicity and nationness in everyday life. To what extent, in what circumstances, and in what manner are ordinary people responsive to, or even aware of, the rhetoric of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs? When and how are ordinary social activities—in homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, stores, cafes, hospitals, offices, and public places—experienced and articulated in ethnic terms? By attending in fine-grained detail to the contexts and contours, the timing and trajectories, the meanings and modalities of ethnicity and ethnicization in everyday life, we hope to illuminate the disjuncture between intense and intractable nationalist politics and the ways in which ethnicity and nationness are embodied and expressed in everyday life. We also hope to gain analytical leverage, and provide empirical grounding, for

INTRODUCTION

17

addressing broader theoretical questions about what ethnicity is and how it works. We analyze nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in this book through a Romanian-Hungarian lens. Like any perspective, this one is selective. In particular, we do not give sustained attention to Germans, Jews, or Roma, all of whom have figured in important ways in ethnopolitical struggles, and in the everyday experience of ethnocultural heterogeneity, in Transylvania. Germans have played a central part in the history of Transylvania, as they have in the history of East Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.42 For centuries, towns throughout much of Eastern Europe were dominated by German (or German-speaking) burghers. Many towns (including Budapest and Prague) were still predominantly German-speaking in the middle of the nineteenth century; some Transylvanian towns remained so into the first decades of the twentieth. Isolated from the main areas of German settlement in Transylvania, however, Cluj lost its German character much earlier; it had become predominantly Hungarianspeaking by the seventeenth century. Germans comprised just 3 percent of the population by the early twentieth century, and a mere 0.3 percent by the 1990s. Jews, too, have figured centrally in the history of Transylvania, and in that of the wider region. Unlike Germans, they were a substantial and increasingly vibrant presence in Cluj in the modern era, their numbers increasing tenfold between 1880 and 1941, their share of the population tripling from 5 percent to 15 percent in the same period. Jews contributed significantly to the town’s economic dynamism and cultural flourishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the Jews of Cluj and its environs, some 18,000 in all, were herded into a ghetto established in a Cluj brickyard in May 1944, and within weeks almost all of them—like the great majority of Jews throughout Hungarian-ruled northern Transylvania—were deported to Auschwitz. Although a much-reduced Jewish community was reconstituted in Cluj after the war, many survivors emigrated to Israel or elsewhere; by the 1990s only a few hundred Jews remained in Cluj.43 Since Germans and Jews are no longer a significant presence in Cluj (or in Transylvania), they figure only in our historical analyses of nationalist politics in Part One—and there only at the margin, for nationalist 42 There is a large literature on the legal, political, economic, and cultural complexities of Transylvanian Saxon history; for an overview, see Schenk, Deutsche in Siebenbürgen. 43 On the history of the Jews of Cluj, focusing on the ghettoization and deportation, but providing ample background material as well, see Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig. For a broader study of Jews in Transylvania, see Carmilly-Weinberger, Istoria evreilor din Transilvania.

18

INTRODUCTION

politics in Transylvania (and a fortiori in Cluj) have centered on a Romanian-Hungarian axis since the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike Germans and Jews, Roma do comprise a substantial minority in contemporary Romania, and a small but visible presence in Cluj. More than half a million Romanian citizens identified their nationality as Roma in the 2002 census, while Roma activists claim a constituency of 2.5 million or more.44 Given the blurred boundaries of the category, especially for those whose dress or lifestyle is not visibly identifiable as Roma, it is illusory to think that there exists an objectively correct number.45 Many scholars propose a figure of about 1.5 million, roughly the number of Hungarians in Romania, though the concentration of almost all Hungarians in Transylvania makes them a much larger minority in that region. In Cluj, self-identifying Roma comprise only 1 percent of the population. Yet they are a familiar presence in and around the central market, selling flowers, used clothes, and tinware. More important, they are (again unlike Germans or Jews today) an important object of public discourse and media representation, and a central point of reference—a fundamental “other”—for both Romanians and Hungarians in everyday life.46 Since 1989, Roma ethnopolitical claims—some of which represent Roma as a trans-state nonterritorial nation—have been richly articulated throughout Eastern Europe, on local, statewide, and suprastate levels.47 This falls outside the scope of our analysis; and in any event Cluj, with its small Roma population, has not been a major focus of Roma ethnopolitical activity. Nor do we explore the complex terrain of self-understanding 44 On Roma in Romania, see Achim, The Roma in Romanian History; O’Grady and Tarnovschi, “Roma of Romania”; Zamfir and Zamfir, eds., T¸iganii între ignorare s¸i îngrijorare; Zamfir and Preda, eds. Romii în Romaˆnia. Some activists prefer the spelling “Rroma,” which more clearly marks the distinction from “Romanian”; some nationally minded Romanians prefer “Rroma” for the same reason. However, “Roma” remains the more common spelling, and we use that spelling here. On the politics of counting Roma in connection with the 2002 census, see chapter 4, pp. 152n107, 154n117, 156. 45 Many of those who identify in some contexts as Roma identify in others as Romanian or Hungarian; and most of those who identify as Roma in Transylvania speak Romanian, Hungarian, or both languages (in some cases in addition to some version of the Romani language). We discuss these classificatory ambiguities in connection with the census (chapter 4, p. 156n29). On the complex and contested issues involved in the counting and classifying of Roma in Eastern Europe, see Ladányi and Szelényi, Patterns of Exclusion, chapter 4. In addition to variation in self-identification, they note striking discrepancies between “expert” classification (for example, by local teachers or social workers), interviewer classification, and self-identification: in Romania only 30 percent of those classified as Roma by interviewers themselves so identified. 46 On the ways in which Roma are represented as racialized and essentialized “others” in postsocialist Eastern Europe, see Kligman, “On the Social Construction of ‘Otherness.’ ” 47 See for example Mirga and Gheorghe, “The Roma in the Twenty-First Century”; Vermeersch, “Ethnic Identity and Movement Politics.”

INTRODUCTION

19

and everyday experience for Roma in Cluj; our Romanian-Hungarian focus means that Roma figure in our discussion as they are represented by others, not as they understand or represent themselves.48 Our Romanian-Hungarian optique, it is important to note, is not fully symmetrical; Part Two gives more weight to the Hungarian than to the Romanian experience of ethnicity. This is not because the book is written from a “Hungarian” point of view, any more than it is from a “Romanian” one. It reflects, rather, a basic asymmetry in the everyday experience of ethnicity, grounded in the ways in which ethnocultural difference is marked—and unmarked—in the nation-state. The normative cultural homogeneity that everywhere accompanies the rise of the nation-state marks as minorities those that do not share the dominant culture; at the same time, it “unmarks” and de-ethnicizes the dominant culture itself. The dominant culture—in the first instance the dominant language— comes to be experienced as the taken-for-granted culture in and of the state; its particularity is thereby masked. The minority culture, correlatively, comes to be perceived from without and experienced from within as marked; its particularity is thereby accentuated. As a result, ethnicity is experientially more salient for Hungarians than for Romanians; and the Hungarian experience of ethnicity therefore figures more centrally in our analysis. 48 In everyday life, Roma are universally referred to—and generally refer to themselves—as Gypsies (T¸igani, cigányok, in Romanian and Hungarian, respectively); the term “Roma” (or “Rroma”) is limited to academic, political, NGO, and some official government discourse. When we discuss Roma as they are talked about by ordinary Romanians and Hungarians, we follow everyday practice in referring to “Gypsies” rather than “Roma.”


The resurgence of nationalist contention in Cluj and elsewhere in East Central Europe during and after the collapse of communist regimes can only be understood historically. This is not to make the anachronistic claim that contemporary conflicts are grounded in “ancient hatreds”: nationalist conflict in East Central Europe, as elsewhere, is a distinctively modern phenomenon, emerging only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet contemporary ethnonational conflicts—the characteristic pattern of claims and counterclaims, the idioms in which they are framed, and the understandings of self and other on which they depend—draw on an historically formed repertoire of contention.1 In certain very general respects, that repertoire is common to all nationalist politics. In other respects, however, patterns of ethnonational contention in East Central Europe have a distinctive configuration, reflecting the manner in which would-be nation-states emerged from sprawling multinational empires in a region of intricately intermixed population. Similarly, patterns of ethnonational contention in Transylvania, while sharing many features of the broader regional configuration, also display a more specific profile, reflecting the character of Transylvania as an ethnic borderland, situated between contending empires— Habsburg and Ottoman—and later between rival national projects, Hungarian and Romanian. A “layered,” or “nested,” approach, affording perspectives of varying spatial and temporal scale and scope, provides the best way of contextualizing contemporary national conflicts in Cluj. To situate the postcommunist ethnonational conflicts in Cluj in wider regional and historical contexts, however, is no simple task. One problem is the dense entwining of history and nationalist politics. Historiographic debates have been ethnicized, and ethnopolitical struggles cast in historical terms, throughout East Central Europe, and beyond; historiographic and ethnonational fault lines have often coincided. Most of the historical literature on Transylvania, and most of the much smaller 1 The modernity of nationalist politics is conceded even by those who argue that modern nations are based in significant ways on premodern ethnies; see A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. On repertoires of contention, see Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.

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PART ONE

literature on Cluj, is highly partisan, and can be used only with considerable caution. But the problem is not simply partisan bias. Even literature that is not nationalist in political commitment or ideological sympathy often remains nationalist (or “ethnicist,” as historian Jeremy King has suggested) in methodological orientation and analytical language, uncritically taking nations and ethnic groups as basic frames of reference and units of analysis.2 Only recently have a growing number of (mainly younger) historians in and of the region sought to establish analytical distance from, and develop critical perspectives on, the prevailingly national—and often expressly nationalist—frames of reference that have governed historical inquiry.3 A further problem derives from the complexity of the Transylvanian and East Central European contexts. In order to sketch these for nonspecialist readers, we have had to simplify, but we have tried not to oversimplify. We have chosen to construe the relevant contexts broadly, and to sketch them in a manner that does at least minimal justice to their complexity. We proceed in telescopic fashion. Chapter 1 provides a wide-angle view of the national question in East Central Europe. We show how the “principle of nationality”—the demand for the congruence of cultural and political boundaries—transformed political language and reshaped political space in the second half of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 narrows the regional focus to Transylvania. We show how modern national claims in and to Transylvania first crystallized during the Revolution of 1848, and we trace the alternating series of nationalizing projects to which Transylvania has been subjected over the course of the last century and a half. In chapter 3, we focus in on Cluj itself. We follow the political vicissitudes that have entailed four changes of sovereignty, and of nationalizing regimes, in the last 140 2 King characterizes “ethnicism” as the assumption that nations have “sprung primarily from a specific set of mass, mutually exclusive ethnic groups defined by inherited cultural and linguistic patterns” (“The Nationalization of East Central Europe,” 123). This is a specific form of a broader phenomenon that Brubaker has characterized as “groupism” (Ethnicity without Groups, introduction and chapters 1–3). A related though distinct issue is “methodological nationalism”: the tendency to take the “nation-state” as equivalent to “society,” and to focus on internal structures and processes at the expense of global or otherwise border-transcending processes and structures (for a discussion and critique, see for example Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. I, 1–3; and Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and the Study of Migration.” In studies of East Central Europe, the more fundamental problem has been the tendency to take the ethoncultural nation—not the territorially bounded nation-state—as an unquestioned category and frame of analysis. 3 For references to such work on Transylvania, see chapter 2, pp. 56–57n1. For the broader region, see illustratively King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation”; and the essays in Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other and Judson and Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe.

NATIONALIST POLITICS

25

years; and we sketch the transformation of Cluj from an overwhelmingly Hungarian town and secure bastion of Hungarian nationalism in the late nineteenth century into the unambiguously Romanian city it had become by the 1980s. Chapter 4 carries the analysis of politicized ethnicity in Cluj into the postcommunist period. We discuss the quasi-revolution that toppled the Ceaus¸escu regime in December 1989; the swift re-emergence of ethnonational contention; the struggle over separate schools in Cluj and TârguMures¸; the nationalization of public space under Mayor Funar; the dispute over the Hungarian demand to re-establish an autonomous Hungarian university in Cluj; and the politics of counting and categorizing in connection with the heatedly contested 2002 census.

Chapter 1




THE NATIONAL QUESTION IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

For a century and a half, the “national question” has been a central focus of political contention in East Central Europe.1 By the “national question” we mean the question of the proper relation between the imagined community of the nation and the territorial organization of the state or, more broadly, the polity.2 How this question is posed—and whether it is posed at all—depends in the first instance on how “nation” is understood. It depends, in particular, on whether “the nation” is understood as being framed by the state or as cutting across the boundaries of state and citizenship. These two possibilities were given classic delineation a century ago by German historian Friedrich Meinecke. Meinecke distinguished two ways of understanding nationhood: as a Staatsnation (state-nation), in which the “nation” is imagined as formed by and congruent with the territorial and institutional frame of the state; or as a Kulturnation (cultural nation), in which the nation is imagined as independent of and prior to the state. In the former perspective, “nation” and “state” are different dimensions or aspects of a single phenomenon; the nation represents, as it were, the demographic substrate of statehood. In the latter, nation and state are fundamentally different phenomena, defined by different frames of reference: the nation by cultural, especially linguistic, boundaries, the state by political and territorial boundaries.3 1 On regional divisions of Europe, a seminal statement is Szu ´´cs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe.” For a more recent discussion, see Johnson, Central Europe, 3–12. 2 It is of course Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities that is responsible for the wide currency of the phrase, though a line of thinking going back at least to Max Weber has criticized objectivist understandings of nationhood and emphasized the subjective underpinnings of the phenomenon. For Weber, see Economy and Society, 922–25; see also Lepsius, “Nation und Nationlismus in Deutschland” on nation as a “conceived order.” 3 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 3ff.; cf. Cosmopolitanism and the National State, 10ff. Having introduced the distinction, Meinecke immediately qualified it, noting the difficulty of drawing a sharp distinction. In the English-language literature, a similar but not identical distinction is often drawn between “civic” and “ethnic” understandings of nationhood and forms of nationalism. An influential early formulation is found in Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism; a particularly sophisticated account is provided by A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. For a critical analysis of this distinction, see Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, chapter 6.

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The national question in its classic form arises in connection with this second understanding of nationhood. For only when the nation is imagined as existing independently of the state can the question of the relation between the two acquire its full force and urgency. Where “nation” is prevailingly understood as constituted by the territorial and institutional frame of the state, as is paradigmatically the case in France, the national question does not arise, or arises only in attenuated form.4 With nation and state definitionally linked, questions driven by the putative lack of congruence between nation and state—such as whether and how state borders should be redrawn to conform to cultural frontiers—can not be posed. “Nation” is of course an important political and cultural category in France, and has been for more than two hundred years. And nationalism as a self-conscious political ideology is held by many historians to have been invented during the French Revolution. But nationalism in France has not been cast in the form of the national question.5 A first presupposition of the national question, then, is that nation and state be understood as independent of one another. A second is that the congruence of nation and state be understood as desirable, even necessary. For most of human history, the idea that political and cultural boundaries should coincide would have been incomprehensible.6 Only in the nineteenth century was the “principle of nationality,” asserting that political authority should be based on nationhood, expressly formulated.7 Gradually, over the full course of the “long nineteenth century,” 4 In the United States, too, “nation” is understood as congruent with the state, and there has been no national question for well over a century. Although the Civil War is not usually understood under the rubric of nationalism, one can see the Civil War as having arisen from, and definitively resolved, the national question in the United States. Samuel Huntington, in “The Hispanic Challenge,” has argued that large-scale Hispanic immigration threatens in effect to reopen the national question, transforming the southwest into the “United States’ Quebec”; but this ignores substantial evidence to the contrary (as reported for example in Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, 225ff.; see also Drezner, “Hash of Civilizations”). 5 The nationalism of revolutionary France had a “vertical” thrust, bearing on the relation between the putatively sovereign “nation,” or “people,” and the structures of political rule, and specifically on the responsiveness of the latter to the former; the question of the boundaries of nation and state on the “horizontal” plane, central to the national question, did not arise, for those boundaries were taken for granted. Even in France, ethnoregional political entrepreneurs have in some circumstances claimed that peripheral regions—including Brittany, Occitania, and Corsica—constitute distinct nations; but such claims have not been central to French politics. 6 As Ernest Gellner put it, with characteristic asperity, “could one think of a sillier, more frivolous consideration than the question concerning the native vernacular of the governors?” (Gellner, Thought and Change, 153). For an argument that qualifies this point, see A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, chapters 1, 3, and 4. 7 The great late eighteenth-century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder articulated an influential conception of nationhood as an ethnocultural phenomenon, independent of the state; although he did not use the term, he was the first to develop the notion of what would later be called the Kulturnation. Yet the national question did not arise for Herder. While he is credited with coining the term “nationalism,” Herder was himself no nationalist, at least in the ordinary sense, though

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as cultural nationalism became politicized, and politics increasingly “culturalized,” the ideal of the nation-state gained ground, envisioning the seamless joining of the imagined community of the nation with the organizational reality of the state. As this occurred, the national question came increasingly, but unevenly, to the fore; it became particularly important in Central and Eastern Europe after the middle of the nineteenth century.8 Before the great reconfigurations of political space along national lines that began in the nineteenth century, political and cultural boundaries were conspicuously discrepant in Central and Eastern Europe. The political landscape of Central Europe was highly fragmented, with a profusion of small sovereign and semisovereign units; here effective political units were much smaller than the imagined cultural nations of Germany and Italy.9 To the east, by contrast, where states faced fewer and weaker barriers to expansion, political units were far larger than what would come to be understood as national units. The vast, loosely integrated, polyglot Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov realms sprawled eastward he could fairly be called a cultural nationalist; indifferent to politics, and hostile to the state, he celebrated the luxuriant diversity and expressive power of national cultures, without calling for an alignment of nation and state. On Herder, see Berlin, Vico and Herder, 153ff., 180ff.; Bauman and Briggs, “Language Philosophy as Language Ideology.” 8 In Northern and Western Europe, the national question has been much less salient. This reflects historically formed differences in political and cultural geography. The early onset of territorial state-building in multiple centers—in France, the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and Scandinavia—generated sustained competition among rival territorial polities. This limited the scope of expansion for any one polity, preventing the emergence of vast empires; it also fostered the development of tighter, more consolidated forms of rule than in the loosely structured empires to the east. On the other hand, incipient territorial states in this region faced weaker obstacles to expansion than did states in the “city belt” of Central Europe. Within the relatively large yet geopolitically constrained and relatively integrated territorial states that emerged in this northern and western region, relatively homogeneous protonational cultures could gradually develop. The result was a much closer—though of course far from perfect—correspondence between political and cultural boundaries. States and the emerging imagined “nations” that developed within their territorial and institutional frame were much less sharply distinct here than in politically fragmented Central Europe or in the sprawling empires of East Central and Eastern Europe. Even in Northern and Western Europe, to be sure, it has been possible to distinguish nation and state. A strong sense of Scottish nationhood, grounded in a separate church and legal system (though not, after the replacement of Gaelic by English, in a distinct language), was preserved after the union with England; variably available understandings of Welsh nationhood also survived incorporation into England. In the Iberian peninsula, institutionally grounded understandings of Catalan nationhood persisted after Catalonia was incorporated into the Castilian monarchy. The point is that relatively culturally homogeneous polities that could be interpreted as national polities—though not as nation-states in the modern sense—emerged relatively early in Northern and Western Europe. 9 This fragmentation resulted from the density of cities and ecclesiastical principalities, which inhibited the early consolidation and expansion of territorial states. On the significance of the Central European “city belt,” a legacy of medieval trading routes, for state- and nation-building, see Rokkan and Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity, 26–27, 35–39.

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CHAPTER 1

and southward from the zone of more compact, consolidated, integrated states of Northern and Western Europe, extending across Eurasia and into Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa (map 2). The national question was therefore posed in sharply differing, almost antithetical forms in Central and Eastern Europe. In Central Europe, national movements sought to overcome political fragmentation and to create larger political structures that would correspond to the imagined German and Italian cultural nations; to the east, national movements sought to create smaller, more nation-sized political structures within, or by secession from, vast imperial realms. Empire and Nation It is the latter, Eastern European variant of the national question that is our concern here. The national question emerged as the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires gradually came to be understood as multinational states. It might be thought that they had always been multinational; but this would be to mistake religious and linguistic heterogeneity for multinationality. To characterize a population as “multiconfessional” or “multilingual” is to point to observable religious practices or linguistic repertoires;10 to characterize it as “multinational” is to refer to self-understandings and political claims. To describe these empires as multinational before the nineteenth century is anachronistic; they became multinational over the course of the nineteenth century, as ethnolinguistic and (especially in the Ottoman Empire) ethnoreligious heterogeneity were reinterpreted as multinationality.11 This involved a profound reconceptualization of identity and reimagination of community; it required a new cultural and political language, centered on the category “nation,” that diffused eastward in geographic space, outward from various local centers, and downward in social space from small elite circles to broader popular constituencies. As nationality became an increasingly salient “principle of vision and division” of the social world, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, political actors began to make claims in the name of putative nations. For what diffused eastward in the nineteenth century, as noted above, was not only the initially nonpolitical Herderian understanding of nations as ethnocultural communities distinct from states, but also the idea that such ethnocultural nationhood ought to be recognized and expressed in the organization of public life. 10 We elide here the difficulties of distinguishing languages from dialects, or of identifying what counts as a distinct “religion.” 11 Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 143.

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When we think today of nationalist movements within multinational states, we are likely to think first and foremost of secessionist movements, aimed at establishing independent nation-states. But most national movements in East Central Europe during the nineteenth century sought autonomy within, not secession from, multinational empires. The fact that many—in the teleological narratives cultivated by nationalists themselves—culminated in independent statehood is no warrant for anachronistically imputing secessionist aims to earlier phases of the movements. Nationalist movements in the Ottoman state were an exception. Secession was pursued there not because nationalist movements were stronger, but because the state was much weaker. Having attained the apogee of its power in Europe in the late seventeenth century, when its armies reached the gates of Vienna, the Ottoman state had been in slow decline ever since, and had long been known as the “sick man of Europe.” This gave rise to the so-called Eastern Question in international relations: the question of how to respond to this decline and the power vacuum it created. Chronic state weakness called into question the territorial integrity of the state, and nationalism provided a convenient justification for territorial reconfiguration under the auspices of the Great Powers.12 Independence was not so much won by national movements as bestowed by what today would be called the “international community.” The Great Powers presided over the reorganization of the Balkans, establishing Greece as an independent state (and Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldavia as autonomous principalities under Ottoman suzerainty) in 1829; permitting the union of the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1858–61; recognizing the full independence of Romania and Serbia in 1878–80; and establishing an autonomous Bulgaria in 1878, later acquiescing in its independence in 1908 (map 3). Outside the Ottoman Empire, independent nation-statehood was unthinkable for most national movements. At a time when progressive thinkers were envisioning the expansion of the scale of social relations, and were skeptical of the viability of small states, most of the newly imagined nations were too small—and their emerging elites, in many cases, too weak—to be plausible candidates for independence.13 And the Habsburg and Russian empires, whatever their internal difficulties and weaknesses, were still far too strong to prompt the thoughts of independence Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 135–48. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 30ff. This was recognized by nationalists themselves; the Czech nationalist leader Karel Havlícˇek, for example, commented in 1848 that an independent Czech state “could not be anything but a very weak state, dependent on other states, and our national existence would be constantly imperiled” (quoted in Kann, The Mutinational Empire, 1: 166). 12 13

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that were invited by the crumbling Ottoman state.14 Throughout the nineteenth century, and even well into World War I, most national movements took for granted the continued existence of an overarching multinational state.

Historical and Ethnocultural Claims in the Habsburg Lands In the Habsburg Empire—where national claims were advanced earlier, more pervasively, and more vigorously than in the Romanov Empire— many national claims were framed in an idiom of “historic rights.”15 This involved appeals to traditional rights and privileges associated with particular territories within the empire. The territories in question had at one time enjoyed independence, more or less substantial elements or traces of which had been preserved in administrative practice, legal theory, imperial charters, or social memory. The Kingdom of Hungary was the most important of these historic territories, with a jealously guarded tradition of autonomy and a constitutional jurisprudence stressing the unity and indivisibility of the territory. Historic rights were also asserted by Croats in the name of the historic Kingdom of Croatia, long loosely united with Hungary, yet preserving a distinct administrative status; by Czechs, who appealed to a constitutional tradition asserting the indivisibility and autonomy of the lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; and, in different ways, by Germans, Italians, and Poles. The appeal to historic rights was neither new nor, in itself, specifically nationalist. Such arguments had formed a familiar counterpoint to statebuilding efforts from the beginning. Claims to provincial autonomy were deployed by local landed elites to resist modernizing, centralizing, and rationalizing state-building initiatives that threatened to erode corporate privileges such as tax exemptions, the monopoly on political representation, and the freedom to exploit peasants without royal interference. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, the old, and in many respects reactionary, idiom of historic rights came to be used in 14 After the establishment of Italy and of a powerful German state in Central Europe, the Great Powers did not seek to weaken the Habsburg Empire, but rather to preserve it as a unit in international affairs. The Romanov Empire, for its part, was still expanding through most of the nineteenth century. 15 We focus in the remainder of this chapter on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. On the national question in imperial Russia, see Kappeler, The Russian Empire, and the essays collected in Brower and Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient. On the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, see Jelavich and Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States; Ramet, “Autocephaly and National Identity in Church-State Relations”; Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy.

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new ways. Traditional understandings of the autonomy of historic territories—narrowly interpreted as the autonomy of privileged orders or estates—were complemented, and eventually supplanted, by modern nationalist understandings of autonomy. The threat from centralizing rulers was given a nationalist gloss; legalistic appeals to historic rights and privileges were overlaid by cultural arguments. Increasingly, it was national culture—in the first instance national language—that was defended against the modernizing, rationalizing center. The beginnings of this shift date from the late eighteenth century, and specifically from the Hungarian reaction to the modernizing reforms of Joseph II. As part of a far-reaching package of reforms, Joseph II had imposed German as the language of administration and education. This was not intended as a nationalist initiative; it was undertaken in the name of progress and administrative rationalization. In Hungary, German was to replace not Hungarian but Latin, deemed ill-suited to the demands of modern, enlightened administration. To progressive reformers, it seemed eminently reasonable to carry out administrative work in German—the main language of the empire’s bureaucracy, and of its urban population, even in Hungary. Nonetheless, this measure triggered a nationalist, or at least protonationalist, response. In rejecting the shift to German, the Hungarian estates did not simply call for a return to the status quo ante—the administrative use of Latin—but began to demand instead the use of Hungarian in administration and education.16 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the protonationalist response had developed into a full-fledged nationalism, which was to find powerful expression—and provoke fierce opposition—during the Revolution of 1848 and the ensuing civil war.17 What gave the long-standing struggle between centralizing Habsburg rulers and the Hungarian nobility a new, protonationalist inflection at this juncture was the availability of a new language in which to frame old grievances—and articulate new ones.18 This was the language of modern nationhood that had emerged in Western and Central Europe in 16 On the Josephine German-Language Edict and the reaction to it, see Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765–1800, 205–11. The movement to reform and enrich the Hungarian language, and to develop a national literature, antedates the Josephine era. But it was in response to the Josephine reforms that previously apolitical cultural nationalism and previously largely culturally indifferent forms of resistance to centralizing rule came together in a newly potent political language. On the earlier Hungarian “language of nationhood,” see the authoritative account in Trencsényi, “Early-Modern Discourses of Nationhood.” 17 On Hungarian nationalism and the Revolution of 1848 in Transylvania, see chapter 2, pp. 60ff. For Hungarian nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Barany, “The Awakening of Magyar Nationalism before 1848.” On Hungarian nationalism in broader historical and comparative perspective, a concise yet nuanced statement can be found in Szu´´cs, Nation und Geschichte, 28ff.; see also idem, “Történeti ‘eredet’-kérdések és a magyar nemzeti tudat.” 18 Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 123.

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the second half of the eighteenth century. The traditional idiom of historic rights had deployed the term “nation” (more precisely the Latin term natio), but the term had little to do with the modern concept of the nation. The medieval and early modern natio was socially exclusive; it was not a “complete” cross-class community, but was composed of privileged orders or estates. This was a specifically political and legal notion of “nation.” It designated the predemocratic “political nation”: those with the privilege of representing the realm in late medieval or early modern representative assemblies.19 Modern understandings of nationhood, in contrast, envision the nation as a vertically inclusive, cross-class community, embracing everyone within a particular territory or ethnocultural group; they have a social depth and inclusiveness foreign to earlier understandings. This holds for the state-framed understanding of nationhood that was characteristic of the French enlightenment and for the ethnolinguistic understanding of nationhood first articulated by Herder and later characteristic of German romanticism. Although state-framed and ethnocultural understandings of nationhood differ sharply in other respects, both generalize across social strata; both envision a “complete,” potentially selfsufficient community. Both are in this sense intrinsically “populist,” embracing a complete “people” rather than simply the leading strata of a territory. The details of the struggle between the Hungarian estates and Habsburg rulers do not concern us here. What we wish to emphasize is the fateful—though at this point still incipient—joining of territory and culture that would come to dominate politics during the last half-century of Habsburg rule, and set the pattern for the national question in the successor states as well. In the late medieval and early modern Ständestaat, or polity of estates, the territory of a state was an administrative and legal patchwork; political territory in the modern sense of a uniform legal, administrative, and cultural space did not exist. The efforts of enlightened absolutist rulers—Maria Teresa and Joseph II in the Habsburg case—to impose a uniform legal and administrative order were resisted by provincial elites in the name of historic rights. But when provincial elites began to use the language of nationalism to articulate and justify their resistance to this rationalizing, homogenizing project, they were led to formulate a homogenizing project of their own, and to extend it to the domain of culture. Even as they resisted administrative and legal rationalization, they began to promote cultural nationalization. Territory came to be understood as a vessel that could and should be “filled up” with national lan19 On premodern understandings of “nation” in the Hungarian context, see Szu ´´cs, “Történeti ‘eredet’-kérdések és a magyar nemzeti tudat.”

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guage and culture: cuius regio, eius natio.20 Territory became culturalized, culture territorialized. Programs of cultural nationalization thus joined older idioms of historic rights and provincial autonomy to newer ideas of ethnolinguistic (or in some cases ethnoreligious) nationhood. By comparison with the relatively tightly organized territorial polities of Northern and Western Europe, little cultural homogenization had occurred before the nineteenth century in the vast, loosely integrated realms to the east. The enlightened absolutist project of introducing a more tightly integrated form of rule, which might have fostered a certain measure of cultural homogenization, not only began later than in the West, but failed decisively, forcing Joseph II to withdraw most of his reforms shortly before his death in 1790. In East Central Europe, the convergence of territory and culture emerged as a self-conscious and fiercely contested nationalist project; it did not develop gradually and unselfconsciously before the advent of nationalist politics, as occurred to a considerable extent in the “old continuous nations” to the north and west.21 Ethnic Intermixing and National Conflict As we observed above, the great empires of East Central Europe were not simply polyethnic; they were—or rather became—multinational. Polyethnicity as such had no political implications; reinterpreted as multinationality, in the age of nationalism, its implications were profound. The convergence of political territory and national culture was now, one might say, both necessary and impossible. It was necessary because this was the very cornerstone of nationalist ideology. But in this intricately intermixed ethnic “shatter zone,” it was also impossible.22 20 In the early modern era, the formula cuius regio, eius religio had given the ruler of the territory the right to determine the religion of the land. This had fostered both the territorialization and the pluralization of religion; it promoted religious homogeneity within territorial units, yet accommodated heterogeneity between them. The same pattern of homogeneity within and heterogeneity among territorial polities would now be extended to the domain of language and culture. 21 On the development of the “old continuous nations” of Northern and Western Europe, see Seton-Watson, Nations and States, chapter 2. This prenationalist process of cultural homogenization is often forgotten, precisely where it was most successful. Who remembers the Angles, Saxons, or Picts? Cultural homogenization continued, to be sure, during the age of nationalism, and was then undertaken in part as a deliberate assimilationist program designed, for example, to turn patois-speaking peasants into Frenchmen. Yet even in the period covered by Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen, the four decades before World War I, much cultural homogenization resulted not from a deliberate policy of assimilation but from the integrative workings of a modernizing economy, state, and society: from wider markets, better roads, a new railroad network, universal military service, and universal schooling (a homogenizing force even apart from its explicit nationalist agenda). 22 On the notion of the ethnic “shatter zone” in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, see Cole, “Ethnicity and the Rise of Nationalism,” 117f.

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The intermixing has powerfully shaped patterns of ethnonational conflict for the last century and a half; despite a radical simplification in the ethnodemographic map during the twentieth century, it continues to do so in certain areas today. The region’s ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious patchwork was a longterm legacy of both geography and politics. By virtue of their sheer size, the sprawling empires that dominated the region embraced an enormous range of cultural difference. But populations were intermixed on much smaller scales as well. More fundamental than polity size, in accounting for heterogeneity, was the exposed geographic position of Eastern Europe.23 Unlike Western Europe, whose relatively protected position sheltered it from nomadic raids after 1000 c.e., Eastern Europe remained vulnerable for centuries thereafter to incursions from the open steppe. These disrupted settlement patterns and generated repeated waves of flight, followed by the repopulation of devastated lands, often with new immigrants. Major population shifts also characterized the HabsburgOttoman frontier, the locus of recurrent military conflict from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.24 Further contributing to ethnoreligious heterogeneity was the fact that East Central Europe straddled the most important fault line within Christendom itself: between Eastern Orthodox and Catholic (and later Protestant) Christianity, with considerable mixing between confessions in Croatia, Bosnia, Transylvania, and elsewhere. Apart from the geopolitical and military dynamics of frontier zones, colonization, immigration, and trading diasporas generated additional ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious heterogeneity. Germans, valued for their skills as peasant colonists and urban settlers, were recruited from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century; German became the chief Armstrong, “Toward a Framework for Considering Nationalism in East Europe,” 284–85. The Ottoman occupation of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, occasioned a general depopulation, leading, after the Ottoman retreat, to a massive Habsburg-sponsored resettlement effort (involving speakers of German, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Romanian) that generated much greater ethnolinguistic heterogeneity within historic Hungary than had existed before the Ottoman conquest. The ethnoreligious mixing in the Krajina region of Croatia—the crescent-shaped frontier region that was the focus of savage interethnic violence during World War II and again in 1990–92, and from which Serbs were eventually expelled by the Croatian military in 1995—was a direct legacy of the Habsburg policy of resettling as border guards along the imperial frontier the Orthodox population that was fleeing advancing Ottoman armies. Ottoman rule in the Balkans left scattered pockets of Turkishspeaking Muslim population, mainly in Bulgaria, Thrace, and Macedonia. There were also largescale conversions to Islam in the Balkans under Ottoman rule, leaving a permanent legacy of ethnoreligious difference, even among speakers of the same language; converts included speakers of Serbo-Croat in Bosnia, of Bulgarian (known today as Pomaks) in Bulgaria, and most (though not all) speakers of Albanian. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 197–98, 200; Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 66; Armstrong, “Toward a Framework for Considering Nationalism in East Europe,” 289. 23 24

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language of urban life throughout the region. Jews, expelled not only from Spain and Portugal but from many cities in Western and Central Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, moved eastward into Poland and Lithuania as well as the Ottoman Empire. Greek (and to a lesser extent, Armenian) merchant communities flourished throughout the region. Under the expanding political roof of the Romanov Empire, Russians and others settled throughout non-Russian regions of the state. As a result of these and other developments, most cities and towns throughout the region were heterogeneous in language or religion, and differed in language, culture, and religion from the surrounding countryside.25 In parts of the region, including much of Transylvania, such differences also divided landlords and peasants. Oppositions of interest between shopkeepers and customers, town and country, and landlords and peasants could be interpreted in ethnoreligious and, later, national terms. The nationalization of political space was highly conflictual in East Central Europe. No matter where boundaries were drawn or proposed, the territories they enclosed were heterogeneous. This pervasive heterogeneity helps explain the recursive, or nested, quality of national conflict in the region: structurally similar conflicts were reproduced at successively lower levels of political space.26

Nationalist Claims and Counterclaims Once ethnolinguistic (and ethnoreligious) heterogeneity came to be reinterpreted as ethnonational heterogeneity, projects aiming at—or simply appearing to promote—cultural homogenization were bound to provoke nationalist resistance.27 What was at stake was no longer the mere existence of a dialect; it was the existence of a “nation.” Every national claim called forth a counterclaim; the strengthening of one nation might portend the extinction of another. As the nationalist projects that could 25 On the “island” character of cities in Eastern Europe, see Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism, 113–22. 26 On such “fractal” patterns generally, see Abbott, “Self-Similar Social Structures.” For analyses of the recursive nature of the distinction between “European” and “non-European” and between “public” and “private” in East Central Europe, see Gal, “Bartók’s Funeral”; Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism. 27 For reasons of space, we limit our attention in this section to political claims; but the nationalization of life had rich social, cultural, and economic dimensions as well. Recent historiography has explored these, and has also been sensitive to regional and local variations that we have had to ignore. See for example the essays in Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other, and in Judson and Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe; Hofer, “Construction of the ‘Folk Culture Heritage’ ”; Mitu, National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania; and Antohi, “Romania and the Balkans.”

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appeal to “historic rights” in particular territories sought to propagate their particular language and culture, others sought to block such efforts. The Hungarian nationalizing stance in multinational Hungary provoked Romanian, Croat, Serb, and Slovak counter-nationalisms; the Czech nationalizing stance in the Bohemian lands, German counternationalism; the German nationalizing stance in Styria, Slovenian counter-nationalism; the Polish nationalizing stance in Galicia, Ukrainian counter-nationalism.28 Some counterclaims—those of Croats, for example—were themselves framed in the idiom of historic rights. But Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serb, and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) national claims—the nationalisms of the “peoples without history,” as Engels dismissively called them29— could not be framed in this way. They appealed instead to ethnicity. These appeals were often buttressed by historical claims to indigeneity, priority, or long-standing ethnonational and territorial continuity. But the claims rested ultimately on the putatively natural—though historically developing—facts of ethnocultural nationality itself, against which historic privileges, traditional institutions, and territorial boundaries could be measured, and in terms of which they could be criticized as artificial and arbitrary. Like historic rights arguments, ethnodemographic arguments were deployed most often in support of claims to “ownership” of national territory. The differing idioms were enlisted in the service of the same goal: the convergence of culture and territory. But they did so from two opposing points of view. Historic-rights arguments took territories as given, asserted national ownership of them, and sought to nationalize their populations. Ethnic arguments took ethnocultural units as given, and sought to redraw provincial, or at least administrative, boundaries to conform with them.30 Given the ethnonational heterogeneity of al28 We do not mean to suggest that Romanian or other nationalisms were merely responses to Hungarian nationalizing policies, or that Hungarian nationalism was merely a response to Joseph II’s centralizing reforms. Nationalism was an internationally circulating political language in the nineteenth century, widely available to educated elites throughout Europe and adapted in a variety of ways to fit local circumstances. Our point here is not to explore the origins of nationalist discourse in the region, but to underscore the interactive nature of nationalist claims-making in a region of inextricably intermixed populations, especially given multiple and mutually contradictory ways of framing national claims. 29 This notion was developed initially in connection with the Revolution of 1848, but Engels was maintaining the same position decades later. In a pamphlet of 1859, for example, Engels notoriously referred to the “remnants” or “debris” of peoples (Völkertrümmer), destined either to be incorporated into larger nations or to remain as “ethnographic monuments without political significance.” On the notion of the “peoples without history” in Marxist thought, see the absorbing study of Rosdolsky, “Friedrich Engels und das Problem der ‘geschichtslosen’ Völker.” 30 The opposition between historic-rights and ethnic idioms might seem to parallel that between Staatsnation and Kulturnation with which we opened our discussion, as well as the familiar contemporary opposition between civic and ethnic understandings of nationhood. Yet there is

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most all historic units, claims based on ethnicity and those grounded in historic rights were bound to collide: territories claimed in the name of ethnic demography invariably cut into or across those claimed in the name of historic rights.31 From the Revolution of 1848 up to (and well into) World War I, numerous schemes were advanced for the restructuring of the Habsburg Empire along national lines, many of them seeking to accommodate both historic and ethnic claims.32 Yet only one far-reaching structural change was adopted: the Compromise of 1867, which inaugurated a half-century of “dualist” rule by reconstructing the empire as a union of two sovereign states, Austria and Hungary, sharing a common ruler, an army, and a common foreign and defense policy, but otherwise quite independent.33 The result was the emergence, within the overarching frame of the monarchy, of a nearly fully independent Hungarian quasi-nationstate. This satisfied Hungarian historic claims to integral national ownership of the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, including Transylvania and Croatia; but it did so at the expense of, and in a manner that could not help but exacerbate, a series of ethnonational counterclaims. a significant difference. Both the historic-rights idiom (in its modern nationalist version) and the ethnic idiom are ways of claiming ownership of a territory by an ethnocultural nation that is understood as existing independently of that territory. Territory did not define the nation in the historic-rights idiom; it was understood to be the property of the nation, and to define the space within which the ethnolinguistic culture understood as constitutive of the nation could be legitimately imposed. 31 Ethnic and historic claims were not always mutually exclusive. For example, provincial boundaries could be based on historic political units, while lower-level administrative and municipal boundaries could be drawn along ethnic lines. More fundamentally, some ethnonational claims were not claims to territory at all, but to a nonterritorial form of national selfdetermination, based on the principle of “personal autonomy.” This was conceived as a way of protecting the national culture of dispersed or intermixed populations, to whom homogeneous national territories could not be assigned. Ethnocultural communities, comprised of all individuals formally registering as members, would be constituted as legal entities, and empowered to establish and administer educational and cultural institutions. The transfer of responsibility for education from territorial governments to nonterritorial ethnocultural communities would mean that the reproduction of such communities (through educational systems) would no longer require control over state or local territory; culture would be freed from the constraints of nationalist politics and ethnic demography. The notion of personal autonomy was developed most fully in the writings of Austrian Social-Democratic theorists Otto Bauer and especially Karl Renner. See Renner, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Nationen; and, in English, Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, esp. 281ff. For an instructive analysis of an experiment in implementing a version of personal autonomy in an ethnically divided Bohemian town—one of several such schemes adopted by Austria in the last decade before World War I— see King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 137–47; for a more comprehensive study, see Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs, 1848–1918 (or the brief account in English in Stourzh, “Problems of Conflict Resolution in a Multi-Ethnic State”). 32 See for example Kann, The Multinational Empire, vol. 2. 33 See map 3, p. 33. On the central importance of the officer corps as a unifying force in the Dual Monarchy, see Deák, Beyond Nationalism.

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The two entities created by the Compromise differed sharply. “Austria” was a heterogeneous composite of seventeen historic “crownlands.” German-speakers, about a third of the total population, were disproportionately represented in the bureaucracy as well as in commerce, industry, and the professions; yet the Austrian half of the empire was neither a German nor a Germanizing state.34 Austria was indeed becoming “nationalized,” in the sense that nationality was increasingly central to politics, and increasingly inescapable as an identity; but this meant not the consolidation of a single state-“owning” nationality, but the consolidation (and increasing state recognition) of multiple nationalities.35 Hungary, on the other hand, claimed to be a unitary and indivisible nation-state, though Hungarian-speakers amounted to a bare majority of the population. A grudging exception was made for Croatia, an historic kingdom incorporated into Hungary yet preserving elements of its autonomy: a second, intra-Hungarian Compromise (1868) acknowledged Croatian nationhood and provided a limited measure of autonomy in internal affairs. Otherwise, Hungary repudiated all claims made in the name of other nations and ruled out the creation of any ethnically defined territorial or even local administrative units. The liberal Nationality Law of 1868 provided in principle for education in languages other than Hungarian and for the use of such languages in administrative and judicial settings. But these provisions were disregarded in practice: schools became instruments of assimilation; and Magyarization came to be self-consciously promoted by the state.36 Hungarian nationalizing policies testified to an open, assimilationist understanding of nationhood: the nation was “joinable in time,” in Benedict Anderson’s eloquent words, because it was “conceived in language, not in blood.”37 German burghers, upwardly mobile Slovakspeakers from peasant backgrounds, and Jewish immigrants from Galicia could become Hungarian. It was only later that the Hungarianness of the latter was called into question; before World War I, Jews were welcomed as instruments and agents of Magyarization, and many became ardent Hungarian patriots. The Hungarian-speaking share of the population increased from 47 percent in 1880 to 54 percent in 34 Population figures were of course contested; on the politics of the census, see Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich. 35 King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, esp. chapter 4; Judson, “Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe.” 36 This characterization glosses over many complexities that cannot be treated here. For a nuanced discussion of tensions within Hungarian nationalism, see Hofer, “Construction of the ‘Folk Culture Heritage’ in Hungary.” 37 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145.

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1910.38 Assimilation occurred almost exclusively in the cities and towns; the ethnodemographic map of the countryside remained virtually unchanged.39 Yet the political costs of harsh nationalizing policies outweighed the ethnolinguistic gains.40 National movements that might have been won over to the Hungarian state turned irreconcilably against it. Claims for territorial autonomy within Hungary hardened into demands for secession from Hungary—demands that suddenly became realizable, and were quickly realized, with the collapse of the empire during the final stages of the war. Slovak leaders cast their lot with the new Czechoslovak state; Transylvanian Romanian leaders opted for union with Romania; and Serb and Croat leaders chose union with the Kingdom of Serbia in the new Yugoslav state. The National Question Recast World War I appeared to have changed everything. The war itself led to the intense and pervasive politicization of ethnicity, the polarization of ethnonational allegiances, the ethnicization of social, economic, and political conflict, the internationalization of the national question, and the militarization of ethnonational discontent.41 Toward the end of the war, the collapse of the great multinational empires—Ottoman and Romanov as well as Habsburg—seemed to open the way for a radically new international order. The postwar settlements were based in theory on national self-determination; the principle of nationality seemed to have triumphed.42 Yet the replacement of dynastic empires by what purported to be democratic nation-states (map 4) did not resolve, but only exacerbated, 38 Hanák, “Polgárosodás és asszimiláció.” Census figures are given in Kann, The Mutinational Empire, 2: 303. 39 Deák, “Assimilation and Nationalism in East Central Europe,” 9ff. 40 Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 330–31, 340–42. 41 For a brief but sophisticated overview of these processes, focused on the Russian Empire but bearing on the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires as well, see von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire.” For a broader historical analysis of nationalist politics and the politicization of ethnicity during the war, see Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires, chapters 4 and 5. For a local study of the intertwining of world war, mass flight, Russian occupation, Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements, civil war, and pogroms in the East Galician (today West Ukrainian) town of Lemberg (Lwów in Polish, L’viv in Ukrainian), see Mick, “Nationalisierung in einer multiethnischen Stadt,” 128–44; on the pogrom of November 1918 in that town, from a more culturalist perspective, see Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Popular Violence.” 42 The determination of borders in fact reflected a mixture of geopolitical, ethnonational, and historical considerations. See for example Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 192–208.

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the national question.43 The convergence of territory and culture, polity and nation, remained an elusive and unrealized ideal. The new states invoked the principle of nationality, yet that same principle could be invoked against them. All of the successor states were ethnolinguistically or ethnoreligiously heterogeneous, and this heterogeneity was interpreted, even more consistently than before the war, in national terms. Some were nearly as heterogeneous, in ethnonational terms, as the old empires; and the pattern of national claims and counterclaims in the putatively national successor states closely resembled that of their avowedly multinational predecessors. In the new Polish and newly enlarged Romanian state, for example, the national question resembled that of prewar Hungary. Like Hungary during the last half-century of Habsburg rule, Poland and Romania were not so much national as nationalizing states.44 Their multinational populations were dominated politically by a single national group— a single, self-styled Staatsvolk that claimed exclusive “ownership” of the state.45 The state was understood as the state of and for this national group. Yet despite having “its own” state, the core nation was understood as being in a weak demographic, cultural, or economic position within the state in the face of large, powerful, or putatively dangerous national minorities.46 To remedy this defect, nationalizing elites 43 For splendidly concise overviews of the interwar period, see Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 3–14; and Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 252–61. For a classic analysis of East Central European nationalism in longer-term historical perspective, written just after World War II, see Bibó, “The Distress of East European Small States.” 44 Poland was reconstituted as a country a century and a quarter after disappearing from the map of Europe as a result of successive partitions of its territory by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Romania, which had secured recognition as an independent state in 1878–80, more than doubled in size after the war, with the acquisition of Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and other territories. We discuss the nationalizing policies and practices of interwar Romania (and of prewar Hungary) in chapter 2. On the concept of the nationalizing state, see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 4–5, 9, 63ff., 83–84; for an analysis of interwar Poland as a nationalizing state, see ibid., 84–103. 45 Poles and Romanians were in a somewhat stronger ethnodemographic position than Hungarians had been in Dualist Hungary (comprising 65–70 percent rather than 50–55 percent of the population). Yet in other respects their position was weaker. Poles had lived for more than a century in three different empires, while Romanians had been divided between Ottoman- and (later) Romanian-ruled Moldavia and Wallachia and Habsburg- and Hungarian-ruled Transylvania. In addition, Romanians were divided by religion, with Romanians in Transylvania largely Greek Catholic, and those in the Old Kingdom largely Orthodox. And both Poland and Romania were riven by major regional gaps in economic development. 46 The most significant national minorities were Germans in the western borderlands, Jews in the cities and towns, and Ukrainians in the eastern borderlands of Poland; and Transylvanian Hungarians, Bukovinian Ukrainians, Bessarabian Ukrainians and Russians, Dobrudja Bulgarians, and urban Jews throughout the country in Romania. For a concise, historically informed survey of the origins and main characteristics of three main types of minorities in East Central Europe, see Szarka, Kisebbségi léthelyzetek, 113–28.

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deployed state power to promote the language, culture, demographic preponderance, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the core nation.47 The populations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were even more heterogeneous. Yet these, too, were officially construed as the states of and for particular nations: the diune Czechoslovak and triune Yugoslav or “South Slav” nations, respectively. The premise was that “Czechs and Slovaks would become one people, as the Piedmontese and Neapolitans had become Italian; Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes [not to mention Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Serbo-Croatian–speaking Muslims] would merge into Yugoslavia, as Prussians, Saxons, and Bavarians had merged into Germany.”48 But these were elite projects with no mass support. The new states did not succeed in making “Czechoslovaks” or “Yugoslavs” in large numbers: lower-level national identifications—Czech and Slovak; Serb, Croat, and Slovene—proved much more robust and resonant than the more embracing affiliations. And these lower-level national groups were by no means equal partners: Czechs (with a developed stratum of officials and a flourishing middle class) were dominant in Czechoslovakia, and Serbs from the prewar Kingdom of Serbia (with a functioning bureaucracy and army) in Yugoslavia, although neither comprised a majority of the population. While the states “belonged” in theory to the encompassing Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nations, they were increasingly seen in practice as the states of and for the Czech and Serb core nations. As a result, in addition to national claims advanced by those outside the imagined Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nations (Germans in Bohemia and Hungarians in Southern Slovakia; Vojvodina Hungarians and Kosovo Albanians in Yugoslavia), Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia faced an additional level of national conflict within those imagined communities; this threatened the basic structure, and ultimately the very existence, of the state.49 47 The economic aspects of ethnonational struggles were particularly important in the interwar period. Since major socioeconomic cleavages—above all between landlord and peasant, and between town and country—often coincided with ethnonational distinctions, socioeconomic conflicts were easily interpreted in ethnonational terms. See Jaworski, “Nationalismus und Ökonomie”; and for a contemporary view from the late 1930s, Seraphim, “Wirtschaftliche Nationalitätenkämpfe in Ostmitteleuropa.” We consider this issue in greater detail in chapter 2, pp. 70ff. On statist economic nationalism in this period, see Berend and Ránki, Economic Development in East-Central Europe, 201ff. 48 Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 253. Accordingly, Czechs and Slovaks were lumped into one “Czechoslovak” category in the census, while Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and SerboCroatian-speaking Muslims (though not Slovenes) were similarly lumped for the census into a single “Serbocroat” category. This statistical assimilation was possible because ethnocultural nationality was measured on the basis of mother tongue, and it could be claimed—though the claim was of course contested—that Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croatian constituted single languages (Rothschild, East Central Europe, 88–89, 202–3). 49 See Janos, “Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia,” 5–10 and 23–31.

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In the successor states, as in prewar Hungary, nationalizing stances engendered—and exacerbated—nationalist counterclaims. Slovaks and Croats, initially sympathetic to the new Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, reacted to Czech and Serb hegemony by demanding autonomous territorial polities of their own.50 Other minorities were alienated from the start by their inclusion in a polity that they, and the dominant groups, understood as the political expression—and political “property”—of a nation other than their own. This was particularly true for German and Hungarian minorities, abruptly transformed from dominant (or in the case of Austro-Hungarian and Russian Germans, at least relatively privileged) national groups of Great Powers into second-class citizens of what they considered third-class states. They, too, could invoke the principle of nationality. Germans of Bohemia and Moravia, for example, responded to the declaration of an independent Czechoslovak state by proclaiming compactly German-inhabited territories of the new state as provinces of Austria, justifying this as an exercise of national self-determination.51 Others fled the new states: as many as two-thirds of the Germans from the Prussian territories of Poznania and Pomerania that were ceded to Poland after the war had resettled in Germany by the mid-1920s; while more than 400,000 Hungarians in territories ceded to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (about 13 percent of all Hungarians in those territories) had resettled in rump Hungary.52 Many of those who remained were further embittered by the nationalizing policies and practices of the new states and by their failure (like that of prewar Hungary) to live up to promises for a liberal minority regime.53 50 Of course it was not “the Slovaks” and “the Croats,” as collective individuals, who made these demands; demands were made, rather, in the name of the Slovak and Croat nations. The language we use here and elsewhere in this chapter, in an effort to provide a highly compressed sketch of the tangle of nationalist claims and counterclaims without cumbersome circumlocution, should not be taken to imply the existence of bounded and solidary groups with identifiable collective wills. Even in this period of heightened national identifications and intense national conflicts, the “nations” in whose name claims were made were in fact far from unified in their political stance, and the constellation of stances could shift rapidly in response to changing political conjunctures. 51 Czech forces suppressed the provisional government established in these self-declared provinces, and the Treaty of St. Germain confirmed Czech historic-rights arguments for the integral incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia into the new state. The reconstituted Austrian state—now with a homogenously German population—invoked the principle of national selfdetermination by seeking incorporation into Germany, but this was denied by the victorious powers at the insistence of France. The prevention of this early Anschluss, some historians have argued, paved the way for Hitler’s later, more fateful one. 52 Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, chapter 2; Mócsy, The Effects of World War I, 12. 53 See the collection of country- and group-specific reports prepared for the European Nationalities Congress and published in 1931: Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitäten in den Staaten Europas. The earlier promises included the Czechoslovak declaration at the Paris Peace Conference that it would make the state “a sort of Switzerland” (Macartney, National States and National

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For many, the counterpart of embitterment with the state in which they lived was an intensifying identification with a neighboring state in which their coethnics comprised the dominant national group. Thus, for example, Germans of Bohemia and Moravia had long understood themselves as belonging to a larger, border-straddling Kulturnation. But now, alienated from a polity they did not experience as “their own,” they identified increasingly with the German Reich.54 Other minorities were connected even more closely to neighboring states. Germans in western Poland, and Hungarians in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia had been linked to Germany and Hungary not simply by ties of cultural nationhood, but by bonds of political citizenship; these had been severed by the postwar settlements that reassigned them, along with the territory they inhabited, from one state to another.55 For their part, these neighboring states—Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria— had been the major losers in the postwar settlements, and they openly hoped for territorial revision. In the meantime, they sought to monitor the condition, promote the welfare, support the activities and institutions, and protect the interests of their transborder ethnonational kin. The resulting triadic nexus linking national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they lived, and the external national “homeland” with which they identified was the characteristic configuration assumed by the national question in the interwar period.56 It was the intertwining of the national claims of subordinate groups within the state and those of neighboring “kin” or “homeland” states— both directed against the claims of the nationalizing state—that gave the national question in interwar Europe its peculiarly explosive power. National claims were shadowed by the specter of irredentism, national minorities by the suspicion of disloyalty. This configuration was not entirely new; already in the late Habsburg period, Romanian and Serb national claims had raised the question of cross-border loyalties and irreMinorities, 241–42) and the resolution of the Romanian National Assembly at Alba Iulia in December 1918, calling for union of Transylvania with Romania, but promising “complete national freedom” for minorities (Köpeczi, ed., History of Transylvania, 651). 54 Here as elsewhere in this chapter we necessarily gloss over all kinds of complexities. For a nuanced account of the shifting political stances of Bohemian Germans, see Bahm, “The Inconveniences of Nationality.” 55 Minority identifications and activities were not entirely or unproblematically aligned with or oriented to their external national “homeland” states. Although cross-border funding from the homeland state was significant, many minority organizations resented and resisted direction from the homeland, refrained from irredentist activities, and sought to come to terms with the state in which they lived. 56 On the concept of “external national homeland,” see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chapter 5, which considers in detail the case of Weimar Germany, with comparative reference to post-Soviet Russia. On the “triadic” configuration of the national question, see ibid., 4–7, 55–76, 107–12.

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dentist aspirations. But the acutely aggrieved, determinedly revisionist, and (in the crucial case of Germany) only temporarily weakened states created by the postwar settlements ensured that the transborder dimension of national conflict would thereafter play a much more central role; it was in fact bound up with the background to and the outbreak of World War II.57 The national question was internationalized after World War I not only through cross-border ties between national minorities and neighboring coethnic states, but also—in a very different manner—through the creation of an international minority-rights regime, founded on a series of treaties imposed by the victorious powers on the successor states. In addition to equality in civil and political rights, and the free exercise of religion, the treaties guaranteed the free use of minority languages in private intercourse, civil society, and legal proceedings; the right to establish autonomous, privately funded minority-language schools; and the right to state-provided primary instruction in minority languages where minorities comprised a “considerable proportion” of the population. Treaty-based provisions for minority rights were not new; but the geographic scope of the interwar regime, and the establishment of an international system of adjudication and enforcement, backed by a League of Nations guarantee, were unprecedented.58 While cross-border ethnonational ties to aggrieved and revisionist neighboring states highlighted the equivocal loyalty and identity of minorities and threatened to undermine the postwar settlement, the minority-protection treaties sought to consolidate that settlement by protecting minorities from overly zealous nationalizing policies and thereby assuring their loyalty to the states in which they lived. That was the theory; in practice, the minority-protection regime satisfied no one. It was bitterly resented—as an infringement of sovereignty—by the states on which it was imposed. Yet it was criticized with equal vehemence by minority organizations, who felt it did not go far enough. The treaties made no reference to national self-determination; they did not recognize national minorities as such, but only persons belonging to minorities. Proposals for a system of national cultural autonomy, which would have 57 See Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, especially chapter 8 on the Sudeten crisis. On the complex relation between Nazi Germany, Sudeten German organizations, and the Czechoslovak state in the making of the Sudeten crisis and the Munich agreement, see Smelser, The Sudeten Problem, 1933–1938. 58 For a recent diplomatic history of minority protection in Europe from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. For a more systematic and conceptually oriented analysis of issues involved in minority protection, see Laponce, The Protection of Minorities. The older work of Macartney, National States and National Minorities, is still valuable, as are the studies collected in Veiter, ed., System eines internationalen Volksgruppenrechts.

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constituted minorities as autonomous corporate entities, were rejected on the grounds that this would amount to “setting up a State within a State.”59 Cumbersome in procedure, and contested in principle, the minority-protection regime foundered as international tensions increased in the 1930s. Throughout the interwar period, the national question was intertwined with the “Jewish question.” Antisemitism was of course not new in the region, but it became newly salient after World War I, and the rise of fascist and radical right movements in much of the region made it even more central to politics in the 1930s.60 Cities and towns, as we observed above, had long formed ethnically “alien” enclaves in East Central Europe, and though this had begun to change in more economically dynamic regions in the late nineteenth century, the “nationalization” of the cities, and of key positions in the urban economy, was a central nationalist aim in the new and newly reconfigured states that came into being after World War I. Their conspicuous over-representation in cities and towns, and in certain sectors of the urban economy, made Jews particularly vulnerable to such nationalizing initiatives.61 And the tendency throughout much of the region to identify the peasantry as the source of the authentically “national” made it easy to see Jews as carriers of alien values, practices, traditions, and loyalties.62 Even in Hungary, where Jews had been considered—and had considered themselves—Hungarian, they were now excluded from the imagined community of the nation.

World War II and After Although the national question—more exactly, the inability to resolve it in a stable way after World War I—formed an important part of the background of World War II, the war itself was driven by other forces. Ideologically rooted in völkisch thought, Nazism was, in part, a form of radical nationalism, with a distinctively murderous solutions to its own version of the national question. And Hitler shrewdly exploited the national question in the early phases of German expansion, justifying both the Anschluss of Austria and the incorporation of the Sudeten Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 226. Ezra Mendelsohn, in The Jews of East Central Europe, provides an authoritative survey of Jews and antisemitism in interwar Europe. On fascism and nationalism, see for a recent synthesis Mann, Fascists. Deák, “Hungary,” remains valuable as an overview of the two strands of the interwar Right in that country. 61 For Hungary, see Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945; Kovács, Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics. For Romania, see this volume, chapter 2, p. 75. 62 For a study of antisemitic imagery in Romania in relation to the broader East Central European context, see Ois¸teanu, Imaginea evreului in cultura romaˆna˘. 59 60

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German lands by appealing—not implausibly—to national selfdetermination. But the destruction of what was left of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland soon revealed Hitler’s invocation of national self-determination to have been no more than a rhetorical ploy, used to buy time and prepare for the pursuit of imperialist military aims that transcended the framework of the national question altogether. In the ethnically mixed imperial borderlands, large-scale conventional warfare formed the backdrop to a variety of localized wars and skirmishes, mass deportations, and pogroms in which conventional forces, irregular armed bands, national liberation movements, ethnicized fears, anticommunist convictions, racial ideologies, religious idioms, local scoresettling, and collaboration with and resistance to occupying powers were densely intertwined. This was similar in many respects to the pattern during World War I, only on a much larger scale, and with a vastly greater toll in civilian death, suffering, and displacement.63 The postwar settlement followed quite different lines than that of 1918–20. There was no effort, indeed no pretense, to redraw state borders along ethnonational lines. Prewar borders in the region were largely re-established, with the conspicuous exception of Poland, which was shifted westward a few hundred miles at the expense of Germany, and to the benefit of the Soviet Union, which gained the largely Ukrainian- and Belorussian-speaking eastern borderlands of interwar Poland. Although the new eastern borders of Poland could be justified on ethnographic grounds, the real motives for this westward shift—as for the division of Germany—were geostrategic. The victorious powers refrained not only from redrawing frontiers along national lines, but also from adopting a system of minority rights. No serious effort was made to revive or revise the League of Nations minority-protection regime. An idiom of human rights replaced that of minority rights. Coercive population transfers were central to the postwar settlement.64 While the previous settlement was built on the movement of borders over people, this one sanctioned the movement of people over borders.65 Both aimed at a greater degree of national homogeneity, a closer 63 For an excellent survey, see Rieber, “Civil Wars in the Soviet Union,” which devotes considerable attention to the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Baltic borderlands. On the Ukrainian borderlands, see also Weiner, Making Sense of War. Apart from the Soviet-German borderlands, such ethnicized violence was most intense in Yugoslavia. 64 For recent research on this subject, see the essays in Ther and Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations, especially the very useful overviews by Kramer and Ther; see also the map and accompanying analytical essay in Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 189–93, and the surveys by Naimark, Fires of Hatred; Rieber, “Repressive Population Transfers”; and Wolff, “Can Forced Population Transfers Resolve Self-Determination Conflicts?” 65 The unmixing of peoples through coercive migration had ample precedent. Ethnic cleansing, in fact if not in name, had been practiced on a large scale in the Balkans between 1875 and 1924, most notoriously during and after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and on an even larger

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congruence of territory and culture; though it occasioned enormous suffering, the latter method proved more effective (and more irreversible) than the former. Most dramatic was the flight and expulsion of some twelve million Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries.66 In addition, perhaps two million Poles were expelled from the eastern borderlands of the interwar Polish state, now acquired by the Soviet Union, while perhaps half a million Ukrainians and Belorussians were “repatriated” to the Soviet Union from Poland (while more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians were deported westward and dispersed within Poland so as to remove them from proximity to their coethnics in Soviet Ukraine). On a smaller scale, about 150,000 Hungarians and Slovaks were “exchanged” between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The upshot of these and other movements was a massive simplification of ethnic demography and the creation of relatively homogeneous populations where previously great heterogeneity had been the norm. After the war, the national question receded from public view. The massive discrediting of radical nationalist ideology in the defeated states; the onset of the Cold War, organized around putatively universalist ideologies; the suppression of regional inter-state rivalries by global superpowers; the shift in the west from an idiom of minority rights to one of human rights; the massive simplification of the ethnic demography of the region through genocide, flight, mass expulsion, and population transfer; the suppression of nationalist politics by the communist regimes that took power throughout the region—all these contributed to the postwar eclipse of the national question. Only in Yugoslavia did the national question remain (after a relatively brief hiatus) close to the surface of politics, a chronic source of tension from the early 1960s on, periodically expressed in overtly nationalist form.67 The conventional emphasis on the suppression of nationalist politics by putatively internationalist communist regimes, however, requires qualification. Although antinationalist, at least in the immediate aftermath of the war, communist regimes were by no means antinational. scale during and after the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–22. Further precedent for the postwar population transfers was provided by the massive displacements carried out during World War II itself by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. 66 In the cases of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, these expulsions—or “transfers,” as they were euphemistically called—were sanctioned by the Allies in the 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Those caught up in this enormous unmixing included both German citizens from eastern German territories annexed by Poland and ethnic Germans who were citizens of other states. Nearly a million and a half died (on the death toll from the postwar expulsions, see Kramer, “Introduction,” 27n6). 67 From the large literature on the national question in postwar Yugoslavia, see for example Djilas, The Contested Country, chapter 6; Rusinow, “Nationalities Policy and the ‘National Question.’ ”

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Marxist thought has its own tradition, dating back to the late nineteenth century, of serious engagement with the national question. And communist regimes from Czechoslovakia to China, following the Soviet model, developed an elaborate repertoire of institutions and practices for addressing—in their own idiom, for “solving”—the national question. The Soviet model, epitomized in the slogan “national in form, socialist in content,” and elaborated to a remarkable degree in the 1920s, called for the promotion, indeed proliferation, of national “forms,” including national languages, cultures, schools, territories, legislatures, cultural and scientific institutions, and so on.68 The rationale for this massive and unprecedented exercise in state-sponsored nation-building was that the cultivation of national forms would facilitate the inculcation of socialist “content,” and would help consolidate the precariously integrated new state, in the face of extraordinary ethnic heterogeneity and intensifying nationalism. The promotion of national forms, in short, represented an attempt to domesticate nationalism, to secure the loyalty of citizens in the ethnic borderlands, and to drain nationality of its content even while legitimating it as a form, thereby promoting, in the long run, the withering away of nationality as a vital component of social life. No other state went as far as the Soviet Union in sponsoring, codifying, institutionalizing, and even (in some cases) inventing nationhood and nationality on the substate level. Yet key elements of the Soviet model of institutionalized multinationality—nationally demarcated territories, pervasive counting and categorizing by ethnic nationality, and parallel ethnonational school systems—were adopted in East Central Europe after World War II. Yugoslavia was reconstituted along ethnofederal lines; parallel Czech and Slovak national republics were established in Czechoslovakia in 1969; and a (formally) autonomous Hungarian territory existed between 1952 and 1968 in Romania.69 Except perhaps in Yugoslavia, the ethnonational demarcation of territory, designation of persons, and framing of education did not go as far as it did in the Soviet Union. Yet here, too, the institutionalization of national forms, intended to “solve” the national question, in fact helped keep it alive. In several Eastern European countries (and also of course in the Soviet Union itself), the resurgence of nationalist politics that began in the late 1980s was focused precisely on such institutionalized forms—on ethnonationally defined territories in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and on 68 See Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire; Suny and Martin, eds., A State of Nations; Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment”; Zaslavsky, “Nationalism and Democratic Transition”; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chapter 2; Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. 69 On the Hungarian Autonomous Region, see chapter 2, pp. 82, 83.

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Hungarian-language schools in Romania. The breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, like that of the Soviet Union, occurred along the lines of pre-existing “national” boundaries, as nationally defined “republics” claimed in practice the rights to self-determination they already possessed in theory.70 In other cases, to be sure, the revival of nationalist politics under socialism was not linked to Soviet-style institutionalized national forms. In Poland, the church served as a powerful focus of national sentiment and an effective vehicle of opposition to the regime. In Ceaus¸escu’s Romania, the party turned increasingly to national symbols and myths for legitimation. In Bulgaria, a regime-led “national revival” culminated in the mid-1980s in a coercive assimilationist campaign requiring the country’s Turkish minority to adopt “Bulgarian” names.71 Many fin-de-siècle diagnoses have depicted an uprooted, hypermobile, deterritorialized, postnational world, a world in which the nation-state, undermined from above and below, is no longer an effective locus of political authority.72 Yet in East Central Europe, the “short twentieth century” appeared to end with the triumph, not the transcendence, of the principle that cultural and political boundaries should coincide. Far from moving beyond the nation-state, history—in this part of the world, at least—seemed to be moving back to the nation-state. East Central Europe seemed to be entering not a postnational but a post-multinational era through the reorganization of previously multinational political space along putatively national lines. Like the breakup of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires after World War I, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia at the end of the Cold War (and the reunification of Germany) entailed the replacement of supranational by expressly national models of political authority.73 Yet once again, the convergence of political territory and national culture has remained elusive (or has been achieved only through ethnic cleansing). Once again, the putatively national successor states to multinational polities are in many cases not only polyethnic but—in the political 70 Only one republic in these three states, Bosnia-Herzegovina in Yugoslavia, was not defined in national terms and had no “titular” nationality. This was of course central to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, as Bosnia was carved up by warring Serb, Croat, and Muslim forces. 71 On Romania, see chapter 2, pp. 82ff.; on Poland, see Zubrzycki, Auschwitz With, or Without the Cross?; on Bulgaria, see Dimitrov, “In Search of a Homogeneous Nation.” 72 This paragraph draws on formulations in Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 2–3. 73 The disintegration of the Soviet Union is often casually included in enumerations of phenomena purporting to show a trend toward the weakening or even the “transcendence” of the nation-state. The reverse is more nearly the case. The Soviet Union was itself an attempt to “transcend” the nation-state; the breakup of the Soviet Union (and that of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) represented a return to the nation-state. And even apart from the breakup of multinational states, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 had a pronouncedly national dimension.

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language of the region—multinational. Once again, national minorities, nationalizing states, and external “homelands” or “kin states” advance conflicting national claims. Once again, an international minority-rights regime has been instituted.74 Yet despite these similarities, there are crucial differences in the configuration of nationalist politics in the interwar period and the postcommunist present. Most decisively, the geopolitical situation is radically different. No major state in the region is committed to the revision of territorial borders.75 This reflects the economization of power and the declining material—if not symbolic—significance of territory.76 It also reflects processes of European and Euro-Atlantic integration, which have provided incentives for political elites to avoid inflammatory rhetoric, pursue moderate policies, and conform, or at least appear to conform, to the norms established by international organizations.77 This internationalization of the national question has proved more effective than the minority protection treaties of the interwar period in moderating nationalist claims and institutionalizing national conflict. As the wars of the Yugoslav succession have shown, however, the national question in the region has not entirely lost its explosive potential. For collections of interpretations of the revolutions of 1989, see Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989; Antohi and Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future. 74 From the large literature on nationalist politics in the region after 1989, see for example Suny, The Revenge of the Past, “Provisional Stabilities,” and “Constructing Primordialism”; Laitin, Identity in Formation; Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State; Roeder, “Peoples and States after 1989”; Hann, “Postsocialist Nationalism”; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; Vujacˇic´, “From Class to Nation”; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed. On the theory and practice of minority rights in the region, see Kovács, “Standards of Self-Determination and Standards of Minority Rights”; Tesser, “The Geopolitics of Tolerance”; Kymlicka and Opalski, eds., Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? For a skeptical view, see Burgess, “Critical Reflections on the Return of National Minority Rights.” 75 Open territorial revisionism has been confined to small states like Armenia, committed to gaining full sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. Some commentators thought that post-Soviet Russia, having suffered what could be construed as a “humiliating” loss not only of territory but of its status as a Great Power, would play the part of interwar Germany, but this has not happened; for a comparison of the two cases, focusing on claims to protect transborder coethnics, see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chapter 5. 76 Symbolically, of course, territory remains salient in nationalist rhetoric. Yet even in the realm of discourse, there is nothing quite comparable in post-1989 nationalist politics to the intensely sacralizing rhetoric that was current, for example, in Hungary in the interwar period in reference to the territories lost after World War I (see Zeidler, “Irredentism in Everyday Life”). 77 See, for example, Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe. We touch again on this issue in the conclusion to chapter 4.

Chapter 2




TRANSYLVANIA AS AN ETHNIC BORDERLAND

Transylvania has always been a borderland. During the second and third centuries c.e., as the northern part of the exposed trans-Danubian Roman province of Dacia, it was on the margins of the Roman Empire. During the High Middle Ages, as the eastern region of the kingdom of Hungary, it was on the frontier of European Christendom. During the early modern period, Transylvania was situated on the periphery of two great empires, Habsburg and Ottoman, playing them off against one another. And in the modern era, Transylvania has been on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, and caught between rival Hungarian and Romanian nationalizing projects. It is this last form of betweenness—Transylvania’s location between competing national centers and rival national claims in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—that concerns us here. Yet something must be said, if only schematically, about the historical context in which these rival claims emerged, not least because the claims themselves have been framed in historical terms.1 1 Nationalist contention and historiographic controversy have long been intertwined in Transylvania. Even ancient history is contested; modern history is more so. Recently, a small but growing literature has sought to establish critical distance from the nationalist frameworks that govern most historical inquiry. For critical examinations of Romanian historiography, see Boia, History and Myth; Iordachi and Trencsényi, “In Search of a Usable Past”; Iordachi, “Entangled Histories”; Iordachi and Turda, “Reconciliere politica˘ versus discurs istoric”; Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism; Deletant, “The Past in Contemporary Romania.” Roth, Kleine Geschichte Siebenbürgens is an excellent short history of Transylvania. The best historical survey in English is Köpeczi, ed., History of Transylvania, a (long) one-volume condensation of the three-volume original that was produced by a team of Hungarian scholars. (The full threevolume work is available in English as well.) Although written from a Hungarian perspective, this is a relatively detached work of serious scholarship; the treatment of the modern era in the English version is relatively balanced and is critical, for example, of the nationalizing policies of Hungary in the Dualist period. When the work appeared in Hungary in 1986, Romanian historians—and even politicians—launched a fierce attack on it. The controversy surrounding the volume is documented in the appendices to Péter, ed., Historians and the History of Transylvania. Accounts of the controversy are provided in Péter’s introduction, 48–50, and by some other contributors to the volume; see also Verdery, National Ideology, 219–20. For a balanced appraisal of the English edition, see James Niessen’s review for the Habsburg H-Net list at www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=13227867248083. Impressive in breaking free of the mold of nationalist historiography are Mitu, National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania, examining the ideological tropes of Transylvanian Romanian intellectuals during the late eighteenth

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The Three NATIONES Transylvania was an integral part of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. But how and when the territory was occupied or conquered by Hungarians is a matter of historiographic controversy, which remains framed in nationalist terms. The choice of terms—occupied or conquered—is not innocent. “Occupied” suggests the prevailing Hungarian view, according to which Transylvania was largely uninhabited at the time of the broader Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century; “conquered” indexes the prevailing Romanian view, according to which Romanians—direct descendants of indigenous Dacians and their Roman conquerors—had been continuously present in Transylvania since Roman times, only to be expropriated by the Hungarian invaders and forced into the hills.2 This dispute about the settlement patterns of a thousand years ago—and about ethnogenesis centuries before that— continues to inform nationalist politics even today, licensing claims to indigeneity, and therefore legitimate primacy, in the region.3 As an exposed frontier region of medieval Hungary, whose southern and eastern border zones were settled with colonists enjoying extensive privileges and autonomy, Transylvania developed a distinctive—and particularly complex—legal and institutional regime. The details of that regime do not concern us here, but it is important for our purposes to note that the regime came to be organized in a distinctive manner around the Latin category natio. While in the rest of Hungary, and in most other medieval European states, there was only one natio—comprised of those who enjoyed political rights and other privileges, liberties, and immunities—in Transylvania three nationes were recognized: noble, Saxon, and Szekler.4 The noble natio most closely approximated the natio in Hungary proper and elsewhere. “Noble” in this sense simply meant “free,” and first half of the nineteenth centuries, and several essays on Transylvania by younger Romanian and Hungarian scholars in Trencsényi et al., Nation-Building and Contested Identities; see also the useful bibliography of recent historical work on Romania, Hungary, and RomanianHungarian relations compiled by Bárdi and Iordachi and included in that volume. Although not focused specifically on Transylvania, the works of Sorin Antohi are also exemplary in this respect; for an overview in English, see “Romania and the Balkans.” Among studies produced by scholars outside the region, two deserve special mention: Katherine Verdery’s pioneering Transylvanian Villagers—a model for what we have attempted here in its combination of ethnographic and historical analysis—and Irina Livezeanu’s exemplary Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. 2 Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, 31–40, usefully situates this prevailing “DacoRoman” view historically in a field defined by an opposition between “Latinist” and “Dacianist” accounts of Romanian ethnic origins. A more extensive discussion can be found in Boia, History and Myth, chapter 2. 3 On the connection between nationalist historiography and postcommunist politics, see Boia, History and Myth, 1–26, 227–38. 4 See Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 83ff.

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embracing those who inherited or acquired full legal and political freedoms. In the Transylvanian “counties”—the parts of Transylvania that were organized along administrative lines similar to those prevailing in Hungary proper, as distinguished from autonomous Saxon and Szekler territories—nobles in this sense of fully free men were ipso facto the political nation. Although the noble natio was sometimes called the Magyar natio, one should not anachronistically misconstrue this: notwithstanding its lexical proximity to and etymological continuity with the modern category “nation,” the category natio was quite foreign to modern political and cultural sensibilities. As noted in the preceding chapter, the medieval and early modern natio—in Transylvania as in Hungary proper and elsewhere in Europe—was a privileged legal order or estate, not a cross-class ethnocultural or political community. Ethnic origin and vernacular language were neither sufficient nor necessary for membership in the medieval and early modern natio. Speaking Hungarian did not make peasants part of the Magyar natio; conversely, Romanian ethnic origin was in itself no bar to membership in that natio, though the overwhelming majority of Romanian-speakers were peasants.5 The point should not be overstated. The medieval and early modern natio was defined primarily by legal status, not ethnicity; but privileged status, in the case of the Szekler and Saxon colonists, was granted to and enjoyed by colonists collectively, initially in return for their willingness to settle on the margins of the medieval Hungarian state and to serve as border guards or as agents of economic development. Since the colonists were granted self-ruled territories as well as exemptions and privileges, since their collective autonomy in religious affairs took on ethnoreligious significance with the Reformation (when most Saxons became Lutheran, and many Szeklers Unitarian), and since collective autonomies and liberties were transmitted to descendants, there came into being an association between a legally privileged collectivity, its autonomous territory, and an ethnoreligious community.6 A great gulf, however, separated the Szekler and Saxon nationes from modern understandings of nationhood. They were founded not on ethnicity or shared culture, but on legal privilege, initially conferred in return for services. The origins of the Szeklers remain shrouded in mystery, but by the time the constitutional doctrine of the “three nations” of Transylvania had crystallized in the fifteenth century, they had long since 5 On membership of the medieval and early modern natio in Transylvania, see Sugar, “The Principality of Transylvania,” 121–22; Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement in Transylvania, 4; Köpeczi, History, 221–22. On ethnic stratification in medieval and early modern Transylvanian history, see Beck and McArthur, “Romania: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Development”; Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 114–15, 126, 144–45, 175. 6 On the close association between religion and ethnicity in Transylvania, see the essays in Cra˘ciun and Ghitta, eds., Ethnicity and Religion.

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assimilated linguistically to Magyars, and whatever quasi-ethnic distinctiveness they maintained was more a result of their legally privileged status and the distinctive way of life that it made possible than it was the underlying foundation for that privileged status. In the case of the Saxons, too, ethnic commonality was the product of a cohesive communal life founded on legal privilege, not the basis of that privilege; indeed the colonists who came to be known as “Saxons” did not share a common origin in Saxony (or anywhere else), but were drawn to Transylvania from all over Germany and the Low Countries, coalescing into an ethnic community, defined by a distinctive language, religion, and legally guaranteed communal and territorial autonomy, only well after their settlement in Transylvania.7 The key point for our purposes is that the Transylvanian nationes could be perceived—even if they were thereby misperceived—through the conceptual lens of emerging modern ethnocultural understandings of nationhood. The terminological continuity—together with the quasiethnic aspects of the Szekler and especially Saxon nationes—made it possible to link the traditional system of nationes, conceptually and politically, with emerging modern national projects.8 Romanian intellectuals, from their position outside the system of corporate privilege, were particularly inclined to make this connection.9 The Romanian-speaking Orthodox population had been excluded from the public life of medieval and early modern Transylvania, despite the fact that—whatever the situation in the tenth and eleventh (or earlier) centuries—they were indisputably a significant presence in Transylvania by the twelfth century, and that, by the mid-eighteenth century, they had come to comprise an absolute majority of the population. Romanian speakers were overwhelmingly rural, indeed overwhelmingly serfs. There was no Romanian natio; and the Orthodox Church was merely “tolerated,” while the “Hungarian” (Catholic, Calvinist, and Unitarian) and Saxon (Lutheran) churches were officially recognized as the “received” churches of the land, their clergies benefiting from full and equal rights and privileges.10 When a small Romanian intelligentsia began to form in the second half of the eighteenth century around a nucleus of priests in the newly established Uniate church,11 they were able to graft emerging modern See Köpeczi, History, 180–81, 233–35; Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 346–47. For a subtle account of the emergence of nationalism in Transylvania, suspended between the archaic system of nationes and emerging modern understandings of ethnocultural nationhood, see Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, especially 116–23 and 191–92. 9 The best narrative account in English of the origins of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania is Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement. 10 Ibid., 3–4. 11 The Uniate (or Greek Catholic) Church was established at the end of the seventeenth century as part of a broader attempt to strengthen Catholicism after Transylvania came under 7 8

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ethnocultural understandings of nationhood onto the older institutional frame of the three nationes and four “received churches”; they demanded that the Romanian nation be recognized as the fourth constituent “nation” of Transylvania, and that the Uniate and Orthodox churches be granted a status equal to that of the received churches. In this manner the traditional legal and institutional frame of the “three nations” and “four churches” served as a template for the framing of Romanian national claims, which initially took the form of a demand for inclusion in the archaic Transylvanian system of privileged nations and (national) churches.12

1848: The Emergence of Modern Nationalism The archaic system of privileged nationes and churches was swept away by the Josephine reforms of the 1780s, only to be restored upon the Emperor’s death. It was swept away a second time during the Revolution of 1848, when Transylvania was first subjected to the simplifying and homogenizing embrace of an incipient modern nation-state.13 This occurred through the unification of Transylvania with Hungary. Transylvania had belonged, as we observed, to the medieval kingdom of Hungary; but following the Ottoman conquest of the early sixteenth century, Hungary Habsburg rule. Orthodox clergy were promised full equality if they would convert. In return they had to recognize the Roman pope as head of the church, and accept a few other theological principles; but they were not asked to change the Eastern liturgy. The promise of equal status initially attracted large numbers of Orthodox priests, and congregants followed, since the rhythms, language, and rituals of religious practice remained undisturbed. But the failure to deliver fully on the promise of equal status left many clergy disenchanted, and popular resistance suddenly exploded in the middle of the eighteenth century in response to the preaching of Visarion Sarai, a charismatic Serbian Orthodox monk; this eventually led in 1759 to the renewed toleration of the Orthodox Church (which had lost even that measure of legal recognition after the Union). Thereafter, Transylvanian Romanians were divided between the two churches. On the Union and the importance of Greek Catholic clergy in the early phases of the Romanian national movement, see Hitchins, A Nation Discovered. Greek Catholics in Romania are part of a broader class of churches maintaining Eastern liturgies but recognizing the Roman pope; the other large East Central European Uniate Church developed in eastern Galicia (today part of western Ukraine). For a comparative discussion of the contribution of the Uniate Church to the development of national self-understandings in Romania and Ukraine, see Hann, “Religion and Nationality in Central Europe.” 12 See Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 191. Romanian national claims, anticipated by the Uniate Bishop Ion Inochentie Klein in the 1730s and 1740s, were developed in the works of the “Transylvanian school” intellectuals of the last decades of the eighteenth century, and put forward most imposingly in the Supplex Libellus Valachorum—a petition to the Emperor setting forth, and providing a lengthy historical justification for, the claims to equality as a fourth nation of Transylvania. See Hitchins, A Nation Discovered, chapters 2, 4–6; Prodan, Supplex Libellus Valachorum. 13 On the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary, see the lucid, balanced, and eloquent account in Deák, The Lawful Revolution (or for an abbreviated account idem, “The Revolution and the War of Independence, 1848–1849”). For the Revolution in Transylvania, see also Köpeczi, History, 486–524; Hitchins, A Nation Discovered, chapter 7; Maior, 1848–1849.

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had been partitioned into three zones, and Transylvania had gained a precarious political independence, retaining it for a century and a half under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. When Hungary had come under Habsburg rule in the late seventeenth century, Transylvania had been incorporated and governed as a separate unit. In the 1830s and 1840s, nationally minded Hungarians—influenced by Herder’s prediction that the Hungarian language, and with it the Hungarian nation, was fated to disappear in the surrounding sea of Slavic peoples—began demanding the union of Transylvania and Hungary; this emerged as a key point during the popular uprising of March 1848 in Budapest.14 The union was formally enacted by the Hungarian Diet, approved by the Transylvanian Diet (still constituted according to the old system of privileged “nations”), and ratified by the emperor.15 Hungarian revolutionary leaders aspired to construct a modern nation-state. This meant a liberal constitutional state based on civil equality; it entailed an end to serfdom, feudal privileges and exemptions, and other vestiges of the old regime, which were still very much alive in Hungary, and even more so in Transylvania. To this program of legal and constitutional reform, the great majority of Transylvanians—and Romanian-speakers in particular, who suffered most grievously from the feudal agrarian regime—could and did rally.16 Transylvanian Romanian intellectuals greeted the revolution in Hungary with enthusiasm; many even initially accepted unification with Hungary as a step toward the construction of a modern liberal social and economic order.17 Yet it quickly became clear that a modern nation-state also meant a unitary, centralized Hungarian nation-state, in which Hungarian was to be the sole language of public life. Romanian national claims were rejected on the grounds that the union with revolutionary Hungary had made Transylvanian Romanians full and equal citizens of a modern state.18 Romanian intellectuals had long been committed to corporate recognition of Romanian nationhood; they could not accept a unitary Hungarian nation-state. The Hungarian nationalizing regime engendered Romanian nationalist counterclaims. In May, Romanian nationalist 14 On the Hungarian national movement of the 1830s and 1840s, see Barany, “The Awakening of Magyar Nationalism”; Köpeczi, History, 464–66; Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement, 165–70; Deák, The Lawful Revolution, 44–45. The expansionist drive manifested in the demand for union with Transylvania was characteristic of the time; throughout the nineteenth century, liberal nationalists believed that only large nations could be viable (see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 30ff.). On Herder and early Hungarian cultural and political nationalism, see Sundhaussen, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen, 64–97. 15 Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement, 224; Köpeczi, History, 495. 16 Saxons were ambivalent, concerned about losing their corporate privileges (Köpeczi, History, 490). 17 Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement, 185–90. 18 Ibid., 224, 226, 231.

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leaders mobilized tens of thousands of peasants for a mass national congress, which “proclaimed the independence of the Romanian nation and its full equality with the other nations of Transylvania.”19 When imperial forces recovered the initiative and began a military campaign against the Hungarian revolutionary regime in the fall of 1848, Romanian leaders cast their lot with them, calling Romanian peasants to arms, and hoping—in vain, as it turned out—to gain in return an autonomous Romanian national territory within a reorganized empire.20 In a climate of revolutionary turbulence and mass peasant unrest, the social grievances of Romanian-speaking peasants could be interpreted in ethnonational terms, since these peasants faced Hungarian landlords in most of Transylvania, as well as Hungarian state officials and armed forces, whose repressive measures against peasant unrest further inflamed popular sentiment.21 Conventional warfare—pitting the Hungarian revolutionary regime against Austrian imperial forces, and later also against Russian troops—therefore shaded over into a more intimate, turbulent popular struggle, uniting social grievances and fears, political demands, and amorphous but powerful ethnic and ethnoreligious sentiment. In Transylvania, this war-within-the-war took on an ethnonational coloration, setting—at least in collective memory and nationalist historiography, though the reality was considerably more complex—Romanians against Hungarians, and leading to atrocities on both sides. Thus the Revolution of 1848 led not only to the first crystallization of modern nationalist claims and counterclaims in Transylvania, but also to the first significant episode of ethnic—or, more precisely, intermittently ethnicized—civil war associated with national movements in modern Europe. In Wallachia—formally part of the Ottoman Empire, but in fact a Russian protectorate—the Romanian national movement took a sharply different form during the Revolution of 1848.22 Here both landlords and peasants were predominantly Romanian; social conflicts were 19 Ibid., 256. According to Romanian nationalist tradition, this marked the moment where the nationalist demand for unification of Transylvania with Moldavia and Wallachia was first formulated: “We want to unite with the motherland” (Vrem sa˘ ne unim cu t¸ara!). Recent historiography has distanced itself from this view, observing that Transylvanian Romanian nationalists sought autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, not union with Wallachia and Moldavia (which were themselves united only in 1858–59); see Boia, History and Myth, 141. For their part, the Romanian nationalist intelligentsia in Wallachia and Moldavia looked to one another, not to Romanians in Transylvania; the unification to which they aspired was that of Moldavia and Wallachia. 20 Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement, chapters 6–7. 21 On the complex intertwining of social and national issues on the local level, see Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers, 186–87. This and the next paragraph draw on Brubaker and Feischmidt, “1848 in 1998,” 706, 729, 732. 22 Following the model of revolutions throughout Western and Central Europe, Romanian liberal intellectuals led a revolution in Wallachia in June 1848; the regime lasted three months before being crushed by Ottoman troops at Russian behest (Hitchins, The Romanians, 231–49).

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therefore not framed in ethnic or national terms. National claims—less important in any event than projects of social, economic, and political modernization—focused on external independence vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire and Russia, rather than, as in Transylvania, on internal ethnonational conflict with Hungarians. Hungary and Hungarians were seen not as internal ethnic enemies but as potential external political allies in the struggle against the reactionary powers.23

Dualist Hungary as a Nationalizing State The defeat of the Hungarian revolutionary regime in 1849 inaugurated a period of neoabsolutist rule in Transylvania and Hungary, as it did throughout the Habsburg Empire. Transylvania was detached from Hungary and again governed separately from Vienna. This was a crushing defeat for Hungarian nationalism, but Romanian nationalist hopes were disappointed as well: no concessions were made to their claims for autonomy.24 Within less than two decades, however, Hungary had recovered through negotiation the “virtual political sovereignty” that it had lost in 1849.25 Under the pressure of military defeat and associated financial exigency, the court embarked on a series of constitutional experiments in the 1860s, culminating in the grand constitutional Compromise with Hungary in 1867. As we observed in the previous chapter, Hungary became in effect a unitary nation-state, with nearly complete independence in internal affairs, even as it remained formally part of the Habsburg Empire, now reorganized as a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. And Transylvania once again became an integral part of Hungary.26 This marked the beginning of an alternating series of nationalizing regimes in Transylvania: Hungarian between 1867 and 1918, Romanian between 1919 and 1940, Hungarian again between 1940 and 1944, and Romanian once more (after an internationalist interlude) following World War II. Each change in sovereignty entrained a new or renewed set of nationalizing policies and practices, aimed at making Transylvania an integral part of the putatively unitary and indivisible Hungarian or Romanian nation-state.27 Ibid., 265. Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement, chapter 8; Lengyel, “Siebenbürgen im Neoabsolutismus.” 25 Deák, “The Revolution and the War of Independence,” 209. 26 See map 3, p. 33. 27 We focus in the remainder of the chapter on the Hungarian-Romanian dimension of the national question in Transylvania, and mention Saxons (and other Germans) only in passing. On Saxons in the Dualist era, see Göllner, ed., Die Siebenbürger Sachsen. 23 24

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In Hungary, as elsewhere in Europe, the half-century before World War I was the period in which primary education became, in principle if only unevenly in practice, universal, obligatory, and (in 1907) free of charge. This created a new and potentially powerful means of nationalization.28 At the beginning of the period, almost all schooling was provided by churches, which were free to choose the language of instruction. And during the first decade after the Compromise, Romanianlanguage schooling expanded substantially. Only in 1879 were all schools required to teach Hungarian as a subject.29 Yet state schools, even those established in largely or exclusively Romanian-speaking districts, taught exclusively in Hungarian. And in the final decade before the war, nationalizing pressures intensified sharply. By imposing tough minimum standards on church schools and offering subsidies that schools in disproportionately poor Romanian districts found difficult to resist, the state partially undermined the autonomy of the Romanian church-based school system (though not that of the much richer Saxon school system). The share of Romanian students attending state primary schools increased from 15 percent to 25 percent.30 And twice as many Romanian students attended Hungarian- or German- as Romanianlanguage secondary schools just before the war.31 In other respects, too, post-Compromise Hungary was a nationalizing state, establishing a model that would be adopted by Romania after the war.32 A complex electoral system severely limited the franchise, favoring more urban, educated, and property-owning Hungarians (and Germans) over Romanians. Romanians were gradually squeezed out of countylevel politics and administration. Turn-of-the-century legislation required that only the Hungarian version of place-names be used in official documents or on public signs. The Transylvanian Hungarian Cultural Association—a voluntary association that received financial support from county governments—sought to foster Hungarian culture and language in scattered Hungarian settlements, to “re-Magyarize” settlements that had allegedly been Romanianized, and thereby to link up the 28 On schooling in multinational Hungary in the Dualist era, an oustanding work is Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn, which examines in comparative perspective the experiences of Romanians, Saxons, and Slovaks in Hungary’s modernizing and nationalizing school system. In English, see Köpeczi, History, 587–90, 601–2, 605–6, 624; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem, 189–308; Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, 197–220. For a comparative perspective on education and the national question, see Tomiak and Kazamias, “Introduction”; Eriksen et al., “Governments and the Education of Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups.” On France, see E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, chapter 18. 29 The teaching of Hungarian, to be sure, did not require the teaching of all subjects in Hungarian; and the teaching of Hungarian to Romanians met with only limited success. See Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration, 229–34. 30 Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, 218. 31 Köpeczi, History, 590. 32 Ibid., 600–610, 624.

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compact mass of Hungarians in the Szekler area to “the great sea of Hungarians in the Great Hungarian Plain”; its charter urged Romanians “not only to speak Hungarian but also to regard themselves as Hungarians.”33 The Hungarian nationalizing project was summed up by a contemporary publicist as follows: “A unitary and indivisible state, a unitary and indivisible nation: this is . . . the categorical imperative to which all our reforms are subordinated.”34 Yet Transylvania proved refractory to this project. Its three major languages and five major religions (plus two others with substantial numbers of adherents) made it one of the most heterogeneous regions of Europe; this heterogeneity was not much reduced in the half-century of Hungarian rule. As measured by the admittedly crude instrument of the census, the net result of a strongly nationalizing regime was minimal.35 While the French state was famously turning non-French-speaking peasants into Frenchmen, the Hungarian state was signally failing to turn Romanian-speaking peasants into Hungarians. Its efforts to extend and modernize education were more successful, in fact, in turning them into nationally conscious Romanians.36 What, then, accounts for the limited progress of national homogenization?37 First, assimilation occurred almost exclusively in towns; yet 33 Although the accomplishments of this association were in fact quite modest, the program— and especially the use of public funds to support it—generated bitter protests from the Romanian and Saxon intelligentsias (Köpeczi, History, 607–8). For a broad study of the associational landscape of Transylvania in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in its relation to the changing forms of the national question, see Török, “The Informal Politics of Culture.” 34 Köpeczi, History, 602. 35 The census asked about language, not directly about nationality. The questions differed in the two parts of the monarchy: Austria asked about Umgangssprache, or language of everyday use, and Hungary about mother tongue, which was not interpreted literally as the language first acquired in the family, but rather as the language one was most comfortable using. The latter more closely approximated subjective nationality (see Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich, 14, 428). At the time of the Compromise, the Romanian-speaking share of the population (57 percent in 1880, when the first modern census was undertaken) was nearly twice the Hungarian-speaking share (30 percent), with an additional 10 percent German-speaking. Three decades later, the last prewar census revealed only minimal change: the Hungarian-speaking share of the population had increased to 34 percent, while the Romanian-speaking share had declined to 55 percent (and the German-speaking share to 9 percent). For statistics by language and confession, see Köpeczi, History, 561, 563. Demographer Árpád Varga, in “Hungarians in Transylvania,” estimates Hungarian gains through assimilation between 1880 and 1910 at about 80,000, of whom only about 32,000 were Romanian-speakers; this corresponds also to the estimate of historian László Katus, reported in Hanák, “Polgárosodás és asszimiláció,” 515n5. On the broader problematic of assimilation in Dualist Hungary, affecting in the first instance German-speakers (but not Transylvanian Saxons, who were protected by their own church and an autonomous educational system), Slovak-speakers, and Jews, see (in addition to Hanák) Karády, “Egyenlo´´tlen elmagyarosodás”; Puttkamer, “Mehrsprachigkeit und Sprachenzwang.” 36 E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration, 167–68, 451. 37 In addition to the works cited in note 35, see Köpeczi, History, 564 (or for more detailed discussion, Köpeczi et al., eds., Erdély története, 3:1574–78); Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, 222–23.

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the weight of towns in the Transylvanian population remained minimal, with town-dwellers comprising just 13 percent of the population in 1910. The Hungarian-speaking share of the urban population increased from 49 percent to 59 percent during this period, but even this gain reflected primarily shifts in identification on the part of Germanspeakers and Jews; the Romanian-speaking share of the urban population held constant at just under a quarter.38 In a Transylvanian population that remained overwhelmingly rural even in 1910, Romanians were still more rural, and therefore out of the reach of the urban melting pot. As late as 1910, 86 percent of Romanians were employed in agriculture.39 Second, strong religious institutions limited assimilation. Interconfessional marriages remained exceptional, even within ethnic groups, amounting to only about 10 percent of all marriages, most of these intraethnic.40 The concentration of Romanian-speakers in two clearly national—and nationalist—churches, which were strongly committed to resisting Hungarian nationalizing measures, provided a substantial barrier against assimilation. By contrast, assimilation made much greater headway in northern Hungary among the Slovak-speaking population, precisely because most Slovaks were Catholic, and therefore did not have “their own” church.41 Third, and in conspicuous contrast to the French case, state influence over primary education was limited, though it intensified in the final decade before the war. Schools were wholly in the hands of churches in 1867, and remained largely so even fifty years later. Most Romanianspeaking children continued to study in church-run schools in which Romanian was the language of instruction. And even though these schools were required to teach Hungarian, the results were modest: the share of the Romanian-speaking population reporting knowledge of Hungarian doubled between 1880 and 1910, but only from 6 percent to 13 percent.42 More generally, the state infrastructure was still comparatively weak; the communication, transportation, and administrative structures that promoted integration and assimilation in France were much less well-developed in Hungary. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 265. Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, 223; Katus, “Über die wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der Nationalitätenfrage,” 204. 40 Köpeczi, History, 560. 41 Among Germans, similarly, Catholic “Swabians” in the Banat and Szatmár area were much more likely to assimilate than were Lutheran Saxons. For the significance of separate national churches as bulwarks against assimilation for Romanians and Saxons, see Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration; he provides a summary statement at 451. 42 Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, 223. On the teaching of Hungarian, see especially Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration, chapter 3. Puttkamer also argues that relatively 38 39

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Nationalizing pressures were not simply ineffective; they were counterproductive, inducing ethnopolitical mobilization, institution building, and solidarity among Transylvanian Romanians, and further alienating the Romanian intelligentsia. Although nationally minded Transylvanian Romanians in Dualist Hungary looked to Romania as their T¸ara˘, or mother country, the Romanian national movement was not initially secessionist or irredentist.43 Instead, Romanian nationalists sought autonomy for Transylvania as an historic unit, or for Romanians as an ethnonational collectivity, within Hungary, or at least within the Habsburg Empire.44 For most of the Dualist period, secession from Hungary and union with Romania were scarcely thinkable, let alone desirable.45 (To the extent that union with Romania had been imagined at all, it was envisioned as occurring within an expanded empire that would be reorganized along ethnofederal lines.) Yet when the empire collapsed, Romanian nationalist leaders, alienated from Hungary by its intransigent nationalizing stance, did not hesitate to opt for union with Romania. For this, the legacy of Hungary’s counterproductive nationalizing practices bears substantial responsibility.46 lax Hungarian supervision enabled Romanian primary schools to use history textbooks advocating the Daco-Roman continuity theory, and that in Romanian middle schools, where only textbooks translated from Hungarian texts were permitted, teachers still managed to convey unofficially this view of history (ibid., 349–63); on this point see also Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 144. A similar “hidden curriculum” was characteristic of Hungarian schools under Romanian rule. 43 On the Romanian national movement under Dualism, the best survey in English is Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed. The key line of division within the movement was between “passivists” and “activists,” the former rejecting, the latter endorsing participation in the political life of Dualist Hungary (ibid., chapter 4; on the later, activist phase, see Maˆndrut¸, Mis¸carea nat¸ionala˘). For the economic dimensions of the Romanian national movement in the Dualist period, see Barna, “The Idea of Independent Romanian National Economy”; Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, chapter 6; and Hunyadi, “Economic Nationalism in Transylvania” (the latter addressing the Saxon case as well). 44 On differing understandings of autonomy, and the late nineteenth-century shift in the focus of Romanian nationalist demands from autonomy for Transylvania to autonomy for Romanians, see Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, chapter 9. The latter was more in tune with prevailing understandings of ethnocultural nationality, and had the advantage of embracing the many Romanians of Hungary who did not live in Transylvania proper but in adjacent regions. 45 On the cross-border relations between Romania and the Transylvanian Romanian national movement, see Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, 212–15; idem, A Nation Affirmed, chapter 8; Maˆndrut¸, Mis¸carea nat¸ionala˘, 125–29; Köpeczi, History, 616–21. The Romanian state financially supported Romanian schools in Transylvania, but for the most part it did not seek to intervene politically in the national question in Transylvania. Outside the sphere of official state policy, there were efforts (exemplified by the founding in 1891 of the League for the Cultural Unity of All Romanians) to foster cultural ties between Romanians in Transylvania and in Romania. And some intellectuals and political figures in Romania did promote the idea that Transylvania should unite politically with Romania. Few leaders of the Transylvanian Romanian national movement, however, found this attractive until late in the Dualist period; and the idea became plausible only with the collapse of the empire at the end of World War I. On the shifting stance of the Transylvanian Romanian nationalist movement during the last fifteen years of the monarchy, see Haslinger, Arad, chapter 2. 46 Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 398ff.

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Nationalization Reversed The defeat of the Central Powers in the fall of 1918 entailed the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the Hungarian state. The Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states were proclaimed at the end of October, and Hungary proclaimed its independence on November 1. Minister for Nationalities Oszkár Jászi made a last-ditch effort to preserve the territorial integrity of Hungary by proposing a cantonal-style scheme of national autonomy.47 Jászi’s plan would have granted farreaching autonomy to Transylvanian Romanian and other minorities, while also securing autonomy within largely Romanian Transylvania for Hungarians in the Szekler region and in Kolozsvár.48 But this was too little, too late. Romanian nationalist leaders mobilized as many as a hundred thousand supporters for a mass assembly at Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia), which endorsed a proposal for union with Romania on December 1; and by January 22 the Romanian army had occupied all of Transylvania. This marked the de facto end of Hungarian rule in Transylvania, though the transfer of sovereignty was formalized only by the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920 (map 5).49 The nationalizing policies and practices of Greater Romania, like those of Dualist Hungary, sought to create a unitary, culturally homogeneous nation-state. Yet the two nationalizing projects differed sharply in their proximate aims and instruments. Under Hungarian rule, the “core nation” had been numerically weak (except in the cities) but economically, politically, and culturally dominant; nationalizing policies 47 As a sociologist and public intellectual, Jászi had been one of the few to criticize Hungarian nationalizing policies before the war. In a broad study of the development of nation-states, he had argued that attempts at forced assimilation invariably backfire, hindering rather than fostering what he characterized as “natural” processes of assimilation (A nemzeti államok kialakulása, 231; see also Haslinger, Arad, 56–62). A brief excerpt from Jászi’s work, criticizing Hungary’s nationalizing policies as founded on an illusion, is provided in English in Sugar, ed., Eastern European Nationalism, 205–7, in which Jászi asked rhetorically: “Who is either naïve or stupid enough to believe that 9 million Hungarians are capable of assimilating the other half of the country?” 48 On this and the broader context of Hungarian policy toward Romanians during the last two decades of the monarchy, see Haslinger, Arad; for the details of Jászi’s proposal, see 126. 49 Köpeczi, History, 652ff. “Transylvania” acquired a new and broader meaning after World War I; it came to include not only historic Transylvania but also the other territories that were ceded by Hungary to Romania. These included part of the Banat in the west, along the border with Serbia; the Cris¸ana district (also known as the Partium) in the northwest, along the border with Hungary; and Maramures¸ in the north, along the border of what is today Ukraine. In addition to Transylvania (in this broad sense), Romania also acquired Bukovina and Bessarabia in the postwar settlement. The Greater Romania thus created was twice as large, and twice as populous, as prewar Romania. It was also much more heterogeneous: ethnonational and ethnoreligious minorities comprised 28 percent of the population according to the census of 1930, more than three times the prewar share. See Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 8–10, 130. On nationalizing policies in Bukovina and Bessarabia, see ibid., chapters 2–3; on the latter, see also Petrescu, “Contrasting/Conflicting Identities.”

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and practices therefore sought to strengthen the ethnodemographic base of the core nation through assimilation. For the new Romanian state, the situation was just the opposite: the core nation was demographically dominant, but it was economically, politically, and culturally weak. Nationalizing policies and practices therefore sought primarily to strengthen the economic, political, and cultural position of the core nation, rather than to assimilate the non-Romanian population. Given Romanian demographic preponderance, assimilation was far less urgent than it had been for Hungary; only those held to have been “denationalized” under Hungarian rule were targeted for “renationalization.” Throughout East Central Europe, the economic dimension of the national question was salient after World War I.50 In part, this reflected the continuing erosion of liberalism, already evident in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the growth of state intervention in economic affairs. More directly, it reflected the determination of successorstate elites to use the newly available levers of state power to promote the economic interests of the state-“owning” nation. This was done in the first instance through land reform. Throughout much of the region, the relatively neat coincidence of ethnonational and socioeconomic divisions in the countryside—where ethnically “alien” landlords confronted national peasantries—made land reform politically irresistible, in addition to the considerable economic and moral arguments that could be advanced in its favor.51 This was the case in Transylvania, where large landowners were almost exclusively Hungarian, while those to whom land was distributed were largely, though not exclusively, Romanian.52 An equally important but more difficult task was that of nationalizing the “alien” cities and towns, dominated demographically, economically, culturally, and politically by Hungarians, Germans, and Jews.53 Like other historically subordinate nationalities of East Central Europe, Transylvanian Romanians had a skewed social and economic structure. They were a predominantly peasant population, lacking not only a landowning elite, but also an urban professional, administrative, commercial, 50 For an overview, see Jaworski, “Nationalismus und Ökonomie”; Seraphim, “Wirtschaftliche Nationalitätenkämpfe in Ostmitteleuropa” provides a contemporary account. 51 Rothschild, East Central Europe, 12–13. 52 On land reform in Transylvania, see Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 316ff. As Macartney notes, land reform was carried out with considerably less zeal in the Old Kingdom of Romania, where landlords as well as peasants were Romanian—and where land reform was therefore, from an ethnopolitical point of view, a zero-sum game. Land reform weakened the “Hungarian” churches as well; they lost an estimated 85 percent of their lands, the income from which had supported their educational and charitable undertakings (Szász, “Vom Staatsvolk zur Minderheit,” 94; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem, 379–402, 473–9). 53 For an excellent account of this nationalizing project, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 10–11, 154–55, 170ff.

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technical, and even artisanal stratum.54 (The urban elite stratum that led the Romanian national movement in Transylvania was confined to the intelligentsia, composed largely of clergy, schoolteachers, journalists, and the like.)55 Many Romanian intellectuals viewed this “incomplete” social structure as problematic. In one representative diagnosis: Our country, in which we [Romanians] hold both the historic rights, and the rights deriving from being the constituents and the creators of the State, and [in which we comprise] the absolute majority, . . . has, compared to its overwhelmingly Romanian rural population, an urban population that, for the most part, belongs to other nationalities; its trade, industry, and a large share of banking—and therefore, the main sources of wealth—are in the hands of these non-Romanian inhabitants. [There is] thus a mismatch between town and countryside. This is an abnormal, unnatural situation, for between the Romanian rulers and the Romanian rural population is interposed a largely non-Romanian bourgeoisie.56 To remedy this, Romanian nationalists sought to create a Romanian urban middle class and thereby to “conquer” or “colonize” the cities and towns and their cultural, economic, and administrative institutions.57 The most direct means of doing so lay in the control of the state apparatus. Prior to 1918, the administration had been entirely Hungarian, even at county and local levels in Romanian-dominated regions.58 Many Hungarian civil servants fled for Hungary with the change in regime; others lost their positions after refusing to submit to the “loyalty oath” 54 Even elsewhere in Romania, where a Romanian landowning and administrative stratum did exist, nationalizing the urban economy (in which Jews played a key role) and creating a “modern” Romanian middle class was an important nationalist goal. 55 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 153, 298, notes that most members of this thin urban stratum lived in smaller towns, and that their cultural visibility was further diminished by the fact that they were either “ghettoized,” living and working as “professional Romanians” within Romanian communities and institutions, or vulnerable to Magyarization. 56 Bratu, Politica nat ¸ionala˘ fat¸a˘ de minorita˘t¸i, 23. (The passage is used by Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 1, as an epigraph; we have provided our own translation.) A leading Romanian intellectual and public figure in the interwar period, Traian Bratu was himself a moderate on the national question, and an outspoken critic of the antisemitic extreme right; he was the target of an assassination attempt by nationalist youth in the 1930s (ibid., 14, 264, 274). On the notion of an “incomplete social structure” as a crucial feature of the nationalist movements of “small nations” in Europe, see Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival, 8–9. 57 On the language of conquest and colonization, see Suciu, “Clasele sociale ale roma ˆ nilor din Ardeal”; Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 170, 184. 58 In 1910, fewer than 0.3 percent of Hungary’s state employees were of Romanian origin, although Romanians comprised 16 percent of Hungary’s population. Even in Transylvania, where Romanians comprised 55 percent of the population, only 5.4 percent of state officials, 7.4 percent of county and city officials, and 21 percent of village notaries were Romanian. See Mócsy, The Effects of World War I, 48.

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demanded by the Romanian state.59 Given the weight of the state sector in the economy, the nationalization of state employment—which extended well beyond public administration per se—had important economic and demographic as well as political consequences. Together with the newly Romanianized secondary and postsecondary educational system, it helped create a new Romanian middle class and drew its members into Transylvanian towns. Efforts to Romanianize the urban economy were also furthered by differential access to credit and state contracts and by differential taxation practices.60 In the longer term, the educational system was key to the Romanian collective mobility project. For it was only through schooling that the children of Romanian peasants could receive the training, and acquire the dispositions, that would qualify them for positions in the urban economy and incline them to move to cities and towns. Even in the state sector, the initial shortage of trained Romanian administrative personnel enabled many Hungarians—especially at the lower levels of administration—to keep their positions for some years.61 The nationalization of the educational system was therefore accorded priority. Before 1918, the language of state-run secondary and postsecondary institutions, including commercial and vocational schools, had been exclusively Hungarian; it now became exclusively Romanian. Hungarians, previously greatly overrepresented in public secondary and higher education, now became substantially underrepresented.62 Hungarian confessional secondary and postsecondary schools languished; many were closed by the state, while those that survived suffered declining enrollments, in part because students found it difficult to pass the obligatory Romanian-language graduation exams.63 By the early 1930s, the consequences of the nationalization of education were making themselves felt in the urban economy and in the polity, as a new generation of Romanian students, having passed through the Romanian school system, and adopting a more radical and combative nationalist rhetoric, sought positions in the context of a severe economic crisis.64 Hungarians were then Ibid., chapters 1–3. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 320, 322f.; Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitäten in den Staaten Europas, 399–412. It was not only minorities who experienced discrimination in these respects; many Transylvanian Romanians, too, believed they were disfavored vis-à-vis Romanians from the Old Kingdom. On regional tensions more generally, especially in the sphere of education, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 161ff. 61 Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 294. Mandatory language tests were introduced in 1924, but were not strictly implemented; in the late 1920s, as a contemporary account noted, there were still people in local administrative positions who could not speak a word of Romanian (Tomescu, “Administrat¸ia in Ardeal,” 752–53). 62 Bíró, The Nationalities Problem, 577, 581. 63 Ibid., 549–69. 64 Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 293–96; Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 235–43. 59 60

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squeezed out of public administration by means of strict language tests, and private firms, too, were pressured to increase the share of Romanians they employed.65 Nationalization in the sphere of primary education followed a familiar pattern. The Romanian state took over the entire network of Hungarian state primary schools. In Hungarian districts, the language of instruction in state primary schools was initially Hungarian, but these increasingly functioned de facto as Romanian—and Romanianizing—schools. Minority-language confessional schools were allowed to remain in existence (while all Romanian confessional schools were taken over by the state). Yet just as the Hungarian state had encroached in various ways on Romanian-language confessional schools before World War I, so now the Romanian state encroached on Hungarian-language confessional schools. It required them to teach Romanian as a subject (and to teach Romanian history and geography in Romanian); eroded their resource base by expropriating church land and withholding subsidies; pressured students into attending state schools; found various pretexts for closing schools; and prevented “persons of Romanian origin who had lost their mother tongue” (those judged from their names or church affiliation to have been Magyarized under Hungarian rule) from attending Hungarian schools.66 In the overwhelmingly Hungarian Szekler area, particular efforts were made to “renationalize” the many “hidden” Romanians who, it was felt, had been gradually Magyarized since the eighteenth century. Numerous Romanian schools and churches were established throughout the Szekler region; the number of Hungarian confessional schools fell more sharply here than elsewhere.67 Hungarians’ response to the change of sovereignty, and to the nationalizing measures that followed, was complex.68 The transformation from dominant, “state-bearing” nationality into a subordinate and—in Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 325ff.; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem, 413–14. In addition, Jews (whose native language in Transylvania was predominantly Hungarian) were barred from attending Hungarian high schools, and from using Hungarian as a language of instruction in Jewish schools (Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 343). For an intriguing study of struggles to claim children as the “property” of Czech or German nations in Bohemia during the first half of the twentieth century, and therefore as eligible or ineligible to attend Czech or German schools, See Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation.” 67 On schools, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, chapter 4, especially 139–42, on efforts to “renationalize” previously “denationalized” Romanians in the Szekler region, and 179–80, on Hungarian confessional schools. Writing from a Hungarian perspective, Bíró, The Nationalities Problem, 507–46, provides a detailed account of primary education for Hungarians during the interwar years. Briefer accounts in English can be found in Köpeczi, History, 677–78, and Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 306–13. 68 For overviews, see Szász, “Vom Staatsvolk zur Minderheit”; Bárdi, “A romániai magyarság kisebbségpolitikai stratégiái”; and for a broad treatment that also addresses governmental and nongovernmental perspectives and initiatives in interwar Hungary concerning the “Transylvanian question,” see idem, “Javaslatok, modellek az erdélyi kérdés kezelésére.” An important older 65 66

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Romania as a whole—small minority came as a profound shock for Hungarians, just as the loss of two-thirds of its territory and three-fifths of its population was a profound shock for the new Hungarian state.69 Hungarians’ long-standing and pronounced sense of political, cultural, and civilizational superiority to Romanians made this transformation particularly hard to accept; few Hungarians on either side of the new border were willing to accept it as final.70 Territorial revision was the cardinal aim of Hungary’s foreign policy during the interwar years; irredentism was deeply implicated in the routines and rituals of everyday life as well.71 In Transylvania, open revisionism was of course impossible; but there is no doubt that the great majority of Transylvanian Hungarians hoped that the territorial settlement might be undone, or at least rectified.72 Yet even as Hungarians were united in their hope for eventual revision, they were divided about what stance to take toward the new regime. The main division—recalling a similar division among Transylvanian Romanians in the Dualist era—was between a strategy of passive resistance and nonparticipation and one of active involvement in Romanian public life. Under the latter heading, one of the most interesting

account is Mikó, Huszonkét év. Nastasa˘ and Salat, eds., Maghiarii din Romaˆnia s¸i etica minoritara˘ includes a collection of documents (in Romanian translation) as well as overviews by the editors. For economic aspects, see Hunyadi, “Romániai magyar gazdaságpolitika 1918–1940.” For brief overviews in English of minority political parties in interwar Transylvania, see Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 72ff.; and Köpeczi, History, 680–83. German and Jewish responses to the nationalizing Romanian state were equally complex. On Germans, see Roth, Politische Strukturen und Strömungen; briefer accounts can be found in Roth, “Zum Wandel der politischen Strukturen”; Möckel, “Kleinsächsisch oder Alldeutsch?”, esp. 141–44; and Reinerth, “Zu den innenpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen.” For Jews in interwar Romania, see Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, chapter 4. 69 The two shocks were connected, since refugees from Transylvania and other ceded territories constituted an important nucleus for radically right-wing and revisionist politics in Hungary (see Mócsy, The Effects of World War I). 70 On the historical development of Hungarian stereotypes about Romanians, see Mitu and Mitu, “Die Magyaren über die Rumänen.” 71 On interwar irredentism in Hungary as a social as well as political phenomenon, see Zeidler, “Irredentism in Everyday Life” (or for a more detailed account, idem, A magyar irredenta kultusz). Zeidler emphasizes the role of the government and right-wing organizations in creating and sustaining what he calls the “cult of irredentism,” but also notes the deep social support for the phenomenon, and explores the ways in which emotionally charged irredentist themes, icons, and slogans permeated all of public and much of private life, from twice-daily school prayers through textbooks, newspapers, movies, monuments, street names, commemorations, and ubiquitous iconic representations of the “four ‘detached’ black pieces of Greater Hungary grouped around the white body of the ‘truncated motherland’ ” (this last example is from Barany, “Hungary,” 288). On the support of Transylvanian Hungarian organizations by Hungary during the interwar period, see Bárdi, “A keleti akció.” 72 For critical remarks on the notion of “revisionism,” see Lengyel, “Rumänische Rechtfertigung und magyarischer ‘Revisionismus,’ ” 69–70, arguing against an undifferentiated understanding of “revision” as necessarily irredentist.

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developments, albeit one confined largely to intellectuals, was what came to be called “Transylvanism.” For Hungarians, its primary (but not only) supporters, this generally involved an emphasis on a distinctively Transylvanian or Transylvanian Hungarian identity, at the expense of an unqualified transborder identification with the mother country and the wider Hungarian cultural nation.73 Unlike Transylvanian Romanians before World War I, Transylvanian Hungarians during the interwar period could look, in principle, to the League of Nations Minority Treaty for support. As was the case elsewhere in the region, however, the minority protection system was not particularly effective. It was seen as ineffectual by Hungarians, and as unjustifiably intrusive by Romanians.74 In the 1930s, nationalizing rhetoric, policies, and practices came to focus increasingly on Jews. Already in the 1920s, Transylvanian Jews had been shaken by antisemitic student-led riots.75 In Transylvania as elsewhere in the region, the overrepresentation of Jews among university students and in the urban professional occupations to which Romanians aspired rendered them a vulnerable and visible target in a context of rapidly expanding higher education and overproduction of university graduates.76 In addition, Transylvanian Jews were targeted because they were identified with Hungarians (and indeed most Transylvanian Jews spoke Hungarian, and considered themselves Hungarian, before World War I).77 The 1930s saw the rise of the fascist Iron Guard movement, two of whose mentors, Octavian Goga and Alexandru Cuza, led a short-lived but violently antisemitic government for six weeks in 1937–38. The legacy of the initial phase of Romanian nationalizing rule was mixed. The old Hungarian elite had been weakened, economically as well as politically, and much of the state-dependent stratum had fled to Hungary after the change of regime. A new Romanian elite had emerged, sustained by a Romanianized and Romanianizing educational system. Romanians had established a much stronger presence in the towns and 73 On Transylvanism, the authoritative work is Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß; for a briefer account, see P. Balogh, “Transzilvanismus.” For contemporary debates on Transylvanian identity and regional autonomy, see Andreescu and Molnár, eds., Problema transilvana˘; see also our discussion in chapter 12, pp. 346ff. 74 See Zeidler, “A Nemzetek Szövetsége és a magyar kisebbségi petiticiók.” 75 On the student movement of the early 1920s and its significance in shaping the Romanian extreme right during the interwar period, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, chapter 7; and Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 186–87. On student protests and riots in Cluj, see chapter 3, p. 104. 76 On the rapid expansion of education and its political consequences, see Janos, “Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective,” 98–99, 107ff.; Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 188–89. 77 See Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 186–87.

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urban economy of Transylvania, their share of the urban population doubling from 18 percent in 1910 to 34 percent in 1930. Yet the sharp distinction between the predominantly Romanian countryside and predominantly Hungarian, German, and Jewish towns, though attenuated, was not erased. To the dismay of Romanian nationalizers, the Hungarian language continued to hold sway in many towns, Cluj included.78 The “Hungarian” churches continued to operate a substantial network of schools that educated the majority of Hungarian children.79 In the longer run, prospects for nationalization were favorable, given Romanians’ substantial ethnodemographic majority in Transylvania as a whole. Yet so long as industrial development and migration to the towns remained modest, as they did during the interwar period, twenty years was too short a time for a thoroughgoing nationalization of the towns.80

War and Regime Change The first period of Romanian rule in Transylvania came to an abrupt end in late August 1940 when Hitler, mediating the territorial dispute between his allies, obliged Romania to cede northern and eastern Transylvania to Hungary (map 6).81 Given the intricately intermixed ethnic demography, the partition of Transylvania did not—indeed could not— result in a neat division along ethnolinguistic lines. The territory that was returned to Hungary included Cluj—now renamed Kolozsvár—and about two-thirds of the Transylvanian Hungarian population; but it also included a large Romanian population, comprising nearly half the population in the area concerned.82 The incoming Hungarian forces committed numerous atrocities, including massacres in two villages in which more than two hundred Romanian villagers were killed.83 Refugees flowed 78 As the director of the Demographic Institute in Bucharest observed in 1935, the many posters in public institutions admonishing people to “speak only Romanian” were ineffectual: “everywhere, but everywhere—in the train station, on the train, in the town hall, the prefecture, etc.—you only hear Hungarian, with some honorable exceptions. Let this tolerance be done with! If in all the public institutions everyone would speak Romanian, they would get used to our language, imperceptibly, and we would really seem as if we were in a Romanian country” (quoted in Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 142–43). 79 Köpeczi, History, 677. In 1930–31, 58 percent of Hungarian children attended church-run elementary schools. 80 In 1930, 83 percent of the population of Transylvania still lived in villages (Köpeczi, History, 670). 81 On the diplomatic background to this so-called “second Vienna Award,” see Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, 437–50; and B. Balogh, A magyar-román kapcsolatok 1939–1940-ben. 82 The territory included eastern as well as northern Transylvania, but is generally referred to in the literature as northern Transylvania. 83 For a very tendentious yet archivally based account of the atrocities, see Fa ˘tu and Mus¸at, Horthyist-Fascist Terror in Northwestern Romania. More recently, see T¸urlea, Ip s¸i Tra˘znea;

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heavily in both directions: 200,000 Romanians fleeing Hungarian rule— disproportionately civil servants and others from the urban, educated population—were registered by Romanian authorities, while 100,000 or more Hungarians fled northward from the area that remained under Romanian rule. Nationalizing policies in education and culture were reversed in northern Transylvania: Hungarian state schools were reestablished, while Romanian-language schooling and the Romanianlanguage press were restricted. Most Romanian civil servants lost their jobs, and substantial numbers of Romanian urban workers were dismissed as well.84 As had already been the case in the interwar period, the national question was now closely intertwined with the “Jewish question.”85 Before World War I, during the “golden age of Hungarian-Jewish relations,” Hungarian nationalism had been assimilationist, focused on language, not race; it became dissimilationist—concerned to draw distinctions between “real” Hungarians and Magyarized Jews—only after the war.86 Prewar nationalists had seen Jews as key allies, indeed as agents of Magyarization in Transylvania and other ethnic borderlands; and many Jews understood themselves as Hungarian patriots, even nationalists.87 After the war, a new style of nationalism came to define Jews as a problem, sometimes the problem, rather than—as had traditional Hungarian nationalists before the war—as part of the solution. Seen as communist sympathizers, Jews were blamed for the brief Béla Kun Soviet regime of 1919, and subjected to the white terror that accompanied its overthrow; at the same time, seen as capitalists and educated professionals, they were resented for their disproportionate place Pus¸cas¸, Transilvania s¸i aranjamentele europene; B. Balogh, “A magyar-román viszony és a kisebbségi kérdés 1940 o´´szén.” On the collective memory of the 1940–44 period, see MungiuPippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 113–25. On the relation between the vernacular memories and official commemoration of the massacre at Tra˘znea, see Bucur, “Treznea.” 84 For a brief overview in English, see Köpeczi, History, 684 ff. 85 On this intertwining, see Case, “The Holocaust and the Transylvanian Question.” 86 Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 95. There were upsurges in popular antisemitism during this era, most notoriously in connection with a blood libel trial of the 1880s, but the state remained firmly philosemitic. For a survey of subsequent phases and forms of antisemitism, see Karády, “Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Hungary.” 87 With the help of Hungarian-speaking Jews, Hungarian-speakers, just 47 percent of the population in 1880, had become a slim majority in the state by 1900. For a broad discussion of the vexed and complex issue of Jewish assimilation in Hungarian history, emphasizing political contexts and intellectual developments, see Barany, “ ‘Magyar Jew or: Jewish Magyar’?”. For a sophisticated social history approach to this issue, see Karády, “Egyenlo´´tlen elmagyarosodás”; Karády’s notion of an “assimilationist social contract” is discussed briefly in English in idem, “Religious Divisions,” 162, and in idem, “Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Hungary,” 75–76. On Jews as Hungarian nationalists in the Dualist era, see Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 10–11; Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 117–18. For an overview of Jewish assimilation, Hungarian nationalism, and antisemitism in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary, see Ranki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion.

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in the urban economy.88 Already in 1920, legislation established a quota for Jews in university admissions, though it was not strictly enforced. A series of more draconian antisemitic measures, defining Jews on the Nuremberg model by genealogy rather than religion, and drastically curtailing their participation in public life, were enacted beginning in 1938.89 When northern Transylvania was returned to Hungarian control in 1940, its Jewish inhabitants were therefore rejoining a state that was in the process of systematically depriving them of their rights. Most Jews nonetheless welcomed the change of regime. Historically, Romania had been more strongly antisemitic than Hungary; and some older Jews still perhaps harbored nostalgia for the pre–World War I Hungarian regime.90 Moreover, as we observed above, Transylvanian Jews had been targeted by student protests and riots in the 1920s, by a more broadly based extreme right movement in the 1930s, by the extreme antisemitic GogaCuza regime of early 1938, and by a new wave of antisemitic legislation and violent agitation after the cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union in June 1940.91 In Romania as in Hungary, during the 1930s the “traditional” authoritarian right was challenged by a more radical (and more radically antisemitic) extreme right; the former responded by alternately making concessions to, and resisting, the demands of the latter (and of Nazi Germany) for more extreme measures.92 For Jews, there would thus seem to have been little to choose between in 1940. Yet the change of sovereignty proved disastrous for the approximately 160,000 Jews of northern Transylvania.93 After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, the substantial majority, along with other Hungarian Jews outside Budapest, were deported to Auschwitz,94 while 90 percent of the Jews of 88 On overrepresentation of Jews in the professions, and the political struggles over this, see Kovács, Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics. 89 This paragraph draws on Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, chapter 2; Rothschild, East Central Europe, chapter 4; and Braham, The Politics of Genocide. 90 On the exclusion of Jews from Romanian citizenship during the decades before World War I, see Iordachi, “The Unyielding Boundaries of Citizenship,” 163–71. On Transylvanian Jews welcoming the change of regime, see Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 174; Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania.” 91 On the various forms of antisemitism in 1930s Romania, see Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. 92 Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 124, 202; E. Weber, “Romania”; idem, “The Men of the Archangel.” 93 Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 171 estimates that there were about 200,000 Transylvanian Jews before partition, 80 percent of them in the territories that were ceded to Hungary. The 1941 census found 151,000 Jews in northern Transylvania. 94 Ibid., esp. chapters 18 and 19; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 853–919. The irony that traditionally strongly antisemitic Romania turned out to be safer for Transylvanian Jews than Hungary is noted by Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 211, and Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 173.

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southern Transylvania and the Regat survived (though Romanian forces were implicated in the mass killing of Jews in Moldavia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria, a fact conveniently forgotten by the exculpatory Romanian historiography that emphasizes Antonescu’s role in saving the Jews of southern Transylvania).95 When Romania managed adroitly to switch sides and join the Allies in August 1944, it staked its claim to recover sovereignty over all of Transylvania. This claim was provisionally endorsed by the armistice agreement of September 12, which abrogated Hitler’s award of northern Transylvania to Hungary.96 With Romanian forces now fighting on its side, the Soviet army drove back German and Hungarian forces and occupied northern Transylvania by late October 1944. Seeking revenge for the killing of Romanians under the Hungarian occupation, Romanian nationalist paramilitary forces killed numerous Hungarians.97 Yet the change of regime did not this time immediately occasion a sharp reversal in nationalizing policies. In the first place, the new regime was not a sovereign Romanian regime. With its troops occupying the country, the Soviet Union was able to exert decisive control over political affairs. Soviet authorities suspended the operation of the Romanian administration in northern Transylvania in November 1944, allowing it to resume only in March 1945 when the Soviet-imposed government headed by Petru Groza took office.98 Even after that time, and after Ro95 Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, ceded to the Soviet Union in June 1940, were regained by Romania during the initially successful German-led campaign against the Soviet Union (see map 5, p. 69). The Jews of these regions were deported to Romanian-occupied Transnistria; fewer than a third survived. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 808–53, esp. 818–31, 847–48; Achim and Iordachi, eds., România s¸i Transnistria; Braham, “The Exculpatory History of Romanian Nationalists”; and Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania. 96 On the diplomatic background to the return of Transylvania to Romania after the war, and the various possibilities considered by the Allies, including the redrawing of borders, population exchanges, an autonomous or independent Transylvania, or an autonomous regime for the Szekler region, see Sa˘la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, chapter 2; Romsics, “Wartime American Plans for a New Hungary.” 97 Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, 77; Sa ˘ la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, 55–57; Köpeczi, History, 691. For a very tendentious yet partly archivally based account of anti-Hungarian violence in the fall of 1944, see Gál et al., The White Book. Though by no means insignificant, the Hungarian-Romanian and Romanian-Hungarian violence in Transylvania during 1940 and 1944 remained on a relatively small scale compared with the vast scale of ethnonational violence in Yugoslavia during World War II. On the significance of this point for the lack of violence after 1989, see chapter 4, p. 162. 98 On the intervening period, see Sa ˘ la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania; we include a brief account in chapter 3, pp. 105ff. By suspending the Romanian administration, Soviet authorities fostered hopes among Hungarians that parts of Transylvania might not be restored to Romanian rule. In fact, the Soviet authorities were simply using Transylvania to pressure the king into accepting a pro-Soviet government, just as the decision to reinstate the Romanian administration when the Groza government was appointed was an attempt to give that government some legitimacy in the eyes of Romanian nationalists. Groza, not a communist himself, served as prime minister in communist-dominated governments from 1945 through 1952, though he was increasingly marginal and little more than a figurehead after 1948. A Transylvanian who

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mania’s de jure control over northern Transylvania was ratified by the peace treaty of February 1947, Soviet influence remained pervasive through the 1950s.99 With weak roots in Romanian society, the Romanian Communist Party was utterly dependent on Soviet backing for its rise to power; it closely followed the Soviet line on the national question, as on other important matters, during the first postwar decade.100 Soviet policy on the national question was antithetical to nationalizing policies and practices. It was not simply that Soviet “internationalism” restrained nationalism, though the Soviet Union did have an interest in limiting ethnonational conflict within and between its client states. Beyond this, as we noted in the previous chapter, Soviet doctrine required, or at least legitimated, “national” institutions—native language schools, media, and cultural institutions, and even “autonomous” national territories—for ethnonational minorities. Though “national in form,” such institutions would be “socialist in content,” and therefore—in theory, at least—would not encourage nationalism or threaten the integrity of the state.101 The influence of Soviet nationality policy is evident in the first postwar decade. The term “national minority” was replaced with “co-inhabiting nationalities.”102 The network of Hungarian-language schools in northern Transylvania was left in place, while Hungarian-language schooling expanded in southern Transylvania. A new Hungarian university was created in Cluj alongside the restored Romanian university. And a was fluent in Hungarian as well as Romanian and committed to reconciliation between Hungarians and Romanians, he commented in July 1945 to a journalist from Hungary, “In the future, Hungarian-language schools can operate freely in the territory of Romania and nothing must hinder the free use of the mother tongue in the spheres of culture, public administration, and economic life.” (On Groza, see Rothschild, Return to Diversity, 109–10, and Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 261–62; the quotation is from Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 104–5). 99 Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1958, a step that would eventually give Romanian communist leaders greater room to maneuver (Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, 273–75). 100 During the interwar period, the party had supported full self-determination, including the right to secede, for national minorities. This led authorities to ban the party in 1924, after which time it operated clandestinely and held its congresses abroad. Hungarians, Jews, and Bulgarians were heavily overrepresented among its leadership and miniscule membership, which further contributed to its image as alien and antinational. Minorities retained key leadership positions in the initial postwar years, until their leading figures, Vasile Luca, who was Hungarian, and Ana Pauker, who was Jewish, were purged in the early 1950s. On the Romanian Communist Party in the interwar period, see R. King, A History of the Romanian Communist Party, 9–38, especially 27–38, on the national question and overrepresentation of minorities; Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, 1–33, esp. 5–10; and Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 37–84, esp. 52–53, 65–66, 77–78. On the party’s rise to power, see Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, chapter 3; and Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, chapters 4 and 5. On the purges of Pauker and Luca, see Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 120–35; on Pauker more generally, see R. Levy, Ana Pauker. 101 On Soviet “nationality policy,” see chapter 1, p. 53, and the works cited there. 102 Sa ˘la˘gean, Soviet Administration, 122.

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Hungarian Autonomous Region was established in 1952, comprising the compactly settled Hungarian population in the Szekler region, in which Hungarian-language cultural activities were promoted, residents were allowed to address courts and administrative agencies in Hungarian, and administrative personnel were largely Hungarian.103 Of course, this was also, and much more decisively, a decade of political terror and wrenching social transformation.104 Industry was nationalized, agriculture collectivized, the peasantry destroyed, the propertied expropriated, savings wiped out, traditional parties liquidated, the intelligentsia repressed, history rewritten, churches subordinated to the state, and the Greek Catholic Church suppressed altogether.105 The fact that Romanianization was not resumed in 1944 scarcely means that these were good years for Transylvanian Hungarians, any more than they were for Romanians. Hungarian churches were expropriated; the Hungarian intellectual elite was purged; and the Hungarian Autonomous Region was “autonomous” in name only. The high Stalinist phase was denationalizing for Romanians and Hungarians alike.

The Return to the “Nation” The internationalist, and in many respects antinational, phase of the late 1940s and early 1950s was succeeded by a more national—and later conspicuously nationalist—form of communism. An initial turning point came in 1956. Party leaders feared that the anticommunist uprising in Hungary might spread to Romania by way of Transylvanian Hungarians, and that a new Hungarian regime might even reassert territorial claims to parts of Transylvania.106 In the aftermath of the uprising, they called for a struggle against “nationality isolation” so as to promote “the establishment of closer ties between the national minorities and the 103 Bottoni, “The Creation of the Hungarian Autonomous Region”; Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 116–19; Gagyi, “Magyar Autonóm Tartomány.” Two-thirds of Transylvanian Hungarians, it should be noted, lived outside this region. The official endorsement of “autonomy” for Hungarians evoked concern among the region’s Romanians, who comprised about 20 percent of the population; for them, “autonomy” raised the specter of a “state within a state” or even of a return to rule by Hungary (Bottoni, “The Creation of the Hungarian Autonomous Region,” 86–89). 104 See Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, esp. chapters 5 and 6; Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, esp. 107–10; Chirot, “Social Change in Communist Romania,” 461–67; Ionescu, Communism in Rumania. 105 On the brief “antinational” phase of historiography in communist Romania, see Schöpflin, “Rumanian Nationalism,” 84–89; Deletant, “The Past in Contemporary Romania,” 135–39; Boia, History and Myth, 70–73; Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, 104. During this phase, even orthography was altered to emphasize the kinship between Romanian and Slavic languages. 106 Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania, 260–63; G. Vincze, Illuziók és csalódások, 82–85, 203–4.

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majority people.”107 In 1959, the Hungarian Bolyai University was merged into the Romanian university.108 A year later, the boundaries of the Hungarian Autonomous Region were changed so as to include fewer Hungarians and more Romanians (who now accounted for 35 percent of its population, up from 20 percent), and the region was renamed the Mures¸-Hungarian Autonomous Region, diluting its symbolic and ethnodemographic Hungarianness. In 1968 the region was abolished altogether.109 The movement toward national communism gathered strength after Ceaus¸escu succeeded Gheorghiu-Dej as first secretary of the Communist Party in 1965. Externally, this shift was expressed in the increasing independence from, and eventual sharp break with, the Soviet Union. Internally, it was expressed in the Romanianization of the party leadership, in the rehabilitation of national symbols and traditions, in a revalorization of nationalist historiography, and in a return to the “nation” as a central term of political discourse.110 To varying degrees and in varying forms, this synthesis of nationalism and communism occurred throughout the socialist world; but it was particularly characteristic of late communist Romania, where the glorification of the nation was carried to extreme lengths.111 All state socialist societies sought to produce a new and more homogeneous social order by eliminating or attenuating social differentiation.112 In Romania under Ceaus¸escu, this tendency was particularly pronounced, and omogenizare was openly proclaimed as a goal.113 Differences based on class, region, religion, gender, lifestyle, thought, and voluntary association were all to be eroded. So, too, were differences of ethnicity: homogenizing policies were also, inextricably, nationalizing policies.114 Nationalizing pressures were most significant in the school system. The expropriation of church-run schools by the state in 1948 did not Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 173. On the merger, a major blow to the Transylvanian Hungarian intelligentsia, see chapter 3, p. 109. 109 Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 118–19. 110 Schöpflin, “Rumanian Nationalism”; Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism; Boia, History and Myth, 73–82. 111 One manifestation of this was known as “Protochronism”—the argument that developments in Romanian history anticipated later and better known developments in the West. See Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, chapter 5; Deletant, “The Past in Contemporary Romania,” 155–56. Also significant was the rhetoric of victimization of the nation by outsiders; see Verdery, “Nationalism and National Sentiment.” 112 As Verdery observes, drawing on Claude Lefort, this is the basis of a deep similarity between socialist and nationalist ideologies (“Nationalism and National Sentiment,” 191–92). See also Lefort, “The Logic of Totalitarianism,” 285; idem, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” 297–98. 113 Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 3–4, 32–35. 114 This is true even of policies that were not directed specifically at Hungarians. A good example was the program of “systematization” (sistematizare), a far-reaching plan for rural restructuring and resettlement that was designed to eradicate the distinction between town and 107 108

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immediately reduce Hungarian-language education, given the thenprevailing commitment to extensive minority-language education. Yet in the long run, this did erode a key institutional basis for ethnic selfreproduction.115 For churches had not simply provided Hungarianlanguage education; they had helped ensure the reproduction of a Hungarian social and cultural world, and of a Hungarian view of the world. Their tradition-rich academic high schools were particularly important in reproducing a self-consciously Hungarian elite. The state monopoly over education ensured a tight, centralized control of the curriculum and the teaching staff. The curriculum was redesigned, teachers purged or re-educated, and ideological education emphasized. Hungarian schools were “Hungarian” only in language; in accordance with Soviet nationality policy, they were national in form, but socialist in content. Over time, however, as one observer quipped, education became “socialist in form, national in content,” with the history curriculum glorifying Romania and Romanians and highlighting the threats posed to the nation by foreigners.116 More important than the increasingly nationalist content of the curriculum was the gradual erosion of the initially extensive and separate Hungarian-language school system.117 The regime remained formally committed to education in native language at all levels, a legacy of Soviet nationality policy. But at the secondary and postsecondary levels, this commitment rang increasingly hollow. Hungarian-language instruction was increasingly offered in Hungarian “sections” of mixed schools rather than in separate Hungarian schools; by the late 1980s there were no Hungarian high schools remaining. The number of Hungarian sections was then reduced by making it more difficult to establish Hungarian than Romanian sections. Through these and other measures, Hungarian parents were encouraged or obliged to enroll their children in

country. The scheme—initially developed in the 1970s, shelved for more than a decade, and revived in the late 1980s—envisioned the abandonment or destruction of as many as half of Romania’s 13,000 villages and the construction of hundreds of new “agrarian industrial centers.” The plans generated an international outcry, in part because they were presented as a special threat to the rural Hungarian minority and its cultural heritage. In fact, there is no evidence that the plans targeted Hungarian villages specifically. The regime, in any event, fell before the plans could be implemented on a large scale. See Turnock, “The Planning of Rural Settlement in Romania”; Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 21, 34, 267n16, 273n80. 115 Enyedi, “Oktatásügy,” 76. 116 Quoted in Schöpflin, “Rumanian Nationalism,” 93. Yet while the official curriculum was increasingly informed by Romanian nationalism, many Hungarian teachers managed to counter this with a Hungarian national—and sometimes nationalist—“hidden” curriculum, just as Romanian teachers had done in the Dualist period. 117 This trend was not linear; there were frequent fluctuations in educational policy, and occasional moves to expand Hungarian-language education. We are concerned here not with the details of policy fluctuations, but with the overall trend. For detailed accounts, see Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, chapter 5; Enyedi, “Oktatásügy”; G. Vincze, Illúziók és csalódások, 187–224.

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Romanian-language sections. Vocational instruction in Hungarian disappeared almost entirely, as did university courses of study in Hungarian. The percentage of students studying in Hungarian countrywide decreased from 9.4 percent in 1948–49 to 4.2 percent in the final year of the Ceaus¸escu regime.118 The nationalization of Transylvania’s towns, as we have seen, was still incipient at the end of the first phase of Romanian rule. Thoroughgoing Romanianization occurred only after World War II—though it began under (nominal) Hungarian sovereignty during the war itself with the deportation of (largely Hungarian-speaking) Jews from Nazi-occupied northern Transylvania.119 It was massive state-led industrialization and urbanization after the war that finally accomplished the nationalization of the cities and towns.120 Since the rural population of Transylvania (unlike the urban population) was predominantly Romanian, the migrants drawn to the cities to fill new industrial jobs were bound to be mainly Romanian. The Romanian urban population of Transylvania increased tenfold between 1930 and 1992, while the Hungarian urban population barely doubled (table 2.1).121 By 1992, Romanians comprised more than three quarters of the urban population, up from a third in 1930.122 This was part of a long-term process played out in the entire region in which cities and towns—which had for centuries comprised “islands” distinct in language, religion, and ethnicity from the surrounding countryside, and had Murvai, “A számok hermeneutikája,” 28–29. Several northern Transylvanian towns had large Jewish populations in 1941, including Nagyvárad/Oradea (21,000, or 23 percent of the population), Kolozsvár/Cluj (almost 17,000, or 15 percent), Máramarossziget/Sighetul Marmat¸iei (10,000, or nearly 40 percent); Szatmárnémeti/Satu Mare (13,000, or about 25 percent). Census figures for these and other towns are reported in Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 172. 120 On heavy industrialization, urbanization, and associated social changes, see Chirot, “Social Change in Communist Romania,” esp. 467–68, 471–77. The communist regime was committed from the beginning to accelerating industrial development, and to spreading it relatively evenly across the country. Romania’s industrial output grew 18 percent per year between 1948 and 1953, and 12 percent per year between 1953 and 1968; by 1974, 38 percent of the labor force was employed in industry and construction, up from 14 percent in 1950. The urban population tripled between 1930 and 1974, its share of the total population doubling from 21 percent to 43 percent (ibid., 467, 471, 473, 474). 121 For an overview of ethnodemographic change in urban populations in Transylvania and other regions with significant Hungarian minorities, see Szarka, “A városi magyar népesség.” 122 In the old Saxon territories, mainly in southern Transylvania, and in the Banat and Satu Mare area, Romanianization was aided by the large-scale emigration of Germans. In 1930, Germans still comprised 23 percent of the urban population in southern Transylvania; by 1992, this was down to a mere 2 percent (Varga, “Városodás, vándorlás, nemzetiség”). Although Germans escaped mass expulsion after the war, their numbers were reduced by about a third between 1941 and 1948: some were incorporated into the Waffen-SS beginning in 1943; others fled with the retreating German army in 1944; still others were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor after the war. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ceaus¸escu in effect “sold” Transylvanian Germans to West Germany, just as he sold Jews to Israel (on the latter, see Ioanid, The Ransom of the Jews); most of the remaining Germans emigrated to Germany after 1989. For an anthropological study of a Saxon community in socialist Romania, see McArthur, Zum Identitätswandel der Siebenbürger Sachsen. 118 119

18.6 17.7 34.4 50.2 56.3 64.6 69.2 75.6 77.9

55.1 53.8 58.2 64.5 65.0 68.0 69.4 73.6 74.7

%

340 441 432 437 592 658 848 898 747

1,433 1,654 1,476 1,421 1,558 1,626 1,691 1,604 1,417

Population (thousands)

Hungarian

60.9 64.6 44.9 39.1 33.8 27.7 23.8 20.3 18.3

29.6 31.6 26.7 24.8 25.1 24.2 22.5 20.8 19.6

%

101 105 130 80 146 159 170 71 N/A

580 562 539 333 368 374 348 109 N/A

Population (thousands)

German

18.1 15.4 13.5 7.1 8.3 6.7 4.8 1.6 N/A

12.0 10.7 9.8 5.8 5.9 5.6 4.6 1.4 N/A

%

13 16 71 40 26 24 76 109 153

165 200 290 279 251 150 257 326 416

Population (thousands)

Other

2.3 2.3 7.4 3.6 1.5 1.0 2.1 2.5 3.8

3.4 3.8 5.3 4.9 4.0 2.2 3.4 4.2 5.8

%

Source: Census data reported in Varga, Fejezetek a jelenkori erdély népesedéstörténetébo˝l, pp. 178, 192, 364, 373; 2002 census figures are from Varga, “A romániai magyarság népességcsökkenésének okairól.” Data for 1880–1966 are from questions on mother tongue; data for 1977–2002 are from questions on ethnic nationality.

104 121 331 562 988 1,538 2,464 3,351 3,169

Urban population only 1900 558 1910 683 1930 963 1948 1,119 1956 1,754 1966 2,379 1977 3,559 1992 4,430 2002 4,069

Population (thousands) 2,670 2,812 3,215 3,701 4,041 4,570 5,204 5,684 5,393

Total (thousands)

General population 1900 4,848 1910 5,228 1930 5,520 1948 5,734 1956 6,218 1966 6,720 1977 7,500 1992 7,723 2002 7,226

Year

Romanian

Table 2.1. Transylvanian Population by Ethnic Identification, 1900–2002

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assimilated migrants from the countryside—were themselves assimilated and nationalized by the surrounding countryside.123 Hungarian accounts of this process emphasize deliberate ethnodemographic engineering. They observe that migrants were channeled to Transylvanian industrial centers from the Old Kingdom, not simply from the Transylvanian countryside; that certain Hungarian-dominated towns were targeted for industrialization as a means of Romanianizing them; that it was more difficult for Hungarians than Romanians to settle in “closed” cities, including Cluj; and that the regime assigned Hungarian university graduates to positions in overwhelmingly Romanian areas, while assigning Romanian graduates to positions in areas with substantial Hungarian populations.124 Yet the nationalization of Transylvanian towns resulted primarily from the regime’s economic policies. Although they were inflected by nationalism, these policies were not grounded in a commitment to nationalize the towns; yet they proved more effective in nationalizing urban Transylvania than were the expressly nationalizing policies of the interwar years.125 In marked contrast to the interwar Hungarian state, communist Hungary did not take an open interest in the fate of Transylvanian Hungarians. Until the late 1960s, the doctrinaire view that ethnonational conflicts were grounded in class conflict and destined to be resolved under socialism prevented any serious consideration of the situation of transborder coethnics. Over the course of the next two decades, as nationalizing pressures intensified, the issue gradually re-emerged in internal party and government forums, and the government began to commission reports and research on the subject. But there was no significant public discussion of Transylvanian Hungarians, and no public criticism of Romanian policies, until the second half of the 1980s.126 In the meantime, Transylvanian Hungarians had been rediscovered from below in the late 1970s and 1980s through the unofficial táncház (dance-house) movement, which sought to escape from the cultural tutelage of the socialist state by discovering, preserving, and re-creating 123 On the nationalization of the cities, see Deák, “Assimilation and Nationalism,” 9ff. From a generalizing social science perspective, the underlying dynamics of the process of social mobilization, migration to the cities, and assimilation were explored in Deutsch’s pathbreaking Nationalism and Social Communication, chapter 6. 124 Demographic analysis suggests that until the late 1970s, migrants from beyond the Carpathians settled primarily in proximate southern Transylvanian towns, and were a relatively insignificant presence in Cluj and other northern Transylvanian towns. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, an “aggressive settlement policy” going beyond economic motivations led to an increased presence of Transcarpathian migrants in the towns of northern Transylvania (see Varga, “Hungarians in Transylvania”; for a more detailed account, idem, “Városodás, vándorlás, nemzetiség”). 125 See chapter 3, pp. 110ff. 126 See Bárdi, “The History of Relations,” 63–66; for a more detailed treatment, see Bárdi, Tény és váló, 90–100.

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authentic and endangered national folk culture, especially music and dance.127 Since the chief sites of such folk culture were in Transylvania, the movement generated a new awareness of and interest in Transylvanian Hungarian culture and led many young Hungarians to travel to Transylvania. But it was only in the final years of the Ceaus¸escu era, as economic and political conditions deteriorated in Romania, and as political space began to expand in Hungary, that folkloristic interest in Transylvania came to be overlaid by political demands for the protection of Hungarian culture, framed in the idiom of minority rights. In the late 1980s, minority rights for transborder Hungarians became an important issue both for dissident liberals and for the incipient national-populist opposition; and a leading regime figure declared publicly in early 1988 that transborder Hungarians comprised part of the Hungarian nation.128 A commitment to transborder Hungarians was enshrined in the revised Hungarian Constitution that was adopted in 1989.129 The Romanian communist regime was brutally homogenizing, and its rhetoric was often virulently anti-Hungarian as well as more generally xenophobic and nationalistic. Yet one should not overstate the extent of nationalization. The claims of “cultural genocide” made by some Hungarians abroad during the 1970s and 1980s were grotesquely exaggerated.130 Throughout the period of communist rule, the large majority of Hungarian children continued to receive elementary education in Hungarian, and a large minority continued to receive high school instruction in Hungarian as well.131 The institutions that sustained the reproduction of the Hungarian minority were weakened, but they were not destroyed. Schools and other Hungarian institutions (publishing houses, newspapers, and cultural institutions) continued to provide an institutional frame for ethnic networks. This is what permitted ethnopolitical organization to arise so quickly, and so effectively, after the fall of Ceaus¸escu.132 It is an irony of history that ethnicity was one of the few bases of association that this notoriously nationalist regime did not destroy. 127 See Kürti, The Remote Borderland, esp. chapter 6; Gal, “Bartók’s Funeral,” 448–49. On the ways in which Transylvania continues to be represented in Hungary as a site of authentic Hungarianness, see Feischmidt, “A magyar nacionalizmus.” 128 Bárdi, “The History of Relations,” 66; Bárdi, Tény és váló, 99. 129 “The Republic of Hungary bears a sense of responsibility for the fate of Hungarians living outside its borders and shall promote and foster their relations with Hungary” (Article 6, section 3). On this clause, in the context of a broader discussion of understandings of nationhood in the Hungarian Constitution, see Majtényi, “Special Minority Rights.” 130 See for example Transylvanian World Federation and Danubian Research and Information Center, Genocide in Transylvania. 131 In the last year of the Ceaus ¸ escu regime, 80 percent of Hungarian children in grades 1–4, 76 percent of those in grades 5–8, and 41 percent of those in high school were studying in Hungarian (Murvai, A számok hermeneutikája, 29). 132 On the rapid postcommunist resurgence of ethnopolitical mobilization, see chapter 4, pp. 122ff.

Chapter 3




FROM KOLOZSVÁR TO CLUJ-NAPOCA

The large town today known officially as Cluj-Napoca, like Transylvania as a whole, has a long and contested history. Settlement on the site first appears in the written record as “Napoca” in the early second century c.e. after Dacia was conquered by the Roman emperor Trajan and became a Roman province. Soon thereafter, Napoca was granted a charter as a municipium and was later elevated to the rank of colonia, enjoying certain economic and political privileges. But the Roman administration withdrew from the exposed province of Dacia late in the third century. For nearly a millennium thereafter, there are no references to urban settlement on the site. Yet the Roman-era history and its aftermath remain a significant point of reference for nationalist historiography and for contemporary nationalist politics. Contending historical accounts—offered not only by historians and archaeologists but by politicians, journalists, and occasionally ordinary citizens—divide sharply along national lines. Romanian narratives—of Cluj and of Transylvania more generally—posit a continuity of settlement and descent between pre-Roman Dacian inhabitants and their Roman conquerors, held to have fused into a Daco-Roman population, and modern Romanians.1 Hungarian accounts deny this continuity, positing a sharp and centuries-long break between the ancient Roman municipium of Napoca and the medieval town of Kolozsvár/Klausenburg that first appeared in the written historical record in the early thirteenth century.2 Both narratives can be invoked to claim temporal priority and rightful “ownership” of the city, and both have been used liberally to buttress political claims since the middle of the nineteenth century. The medieval town that grew up on the site of ancient Napoca was part of the kingdom of Hungary. Devastated by the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century, it reemerged in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a commercial crossroads and center of craft production, favored by Hungary’s rulers with economic privileges and local selfgovernment rights. Numerous craft guilds were established in the second half of the fourteenth century, and a patrician stratum based in commerce 1 On the Daco-Roman continuity theory, see chapter 2, p. 57. For the official Romanian nationalist line on the history of Cluj, see Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 5. 2 See for example Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 7.

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and handicraft production displaced the older landed elite in the leadership of the town. An impressive indicator of the town’s prosperity was the monumental Gothic St. Michael’s church, begun in the mid-fourteenth century; its great vaulted nave was completed in the 1430s.3 In the fourteenth century, most of the town’s inhabitants and the local ruling stratum were “Saxons”—a legal status as well as an ethnolinguistic category. By the middle of the fifteenth century, however, population registers suggest that roughly half the population had Hungarian names, and an agreement was reached providing that half of the representatives on the city council were to be drawn from the Hungarian, half from the Saxon population, and that judicial offices were to be held on a rotating basis.4 Although the historical literature refers to the “national struggle” between Hungarians and Germans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the struggle was not between “nations” in the modern sense but between medieval nationes, understood as legally privileged status groups, not as “demotic,” vertically inclusive ethnocultural communities.5 After the Ottoman-imposed partition of Hungary in 1541, Transylvania became an independent principality, and Kolozsvár/Klausenburg enjoyed a period of economic and especially cultural flourishing. During the Reformation, the successive waves of which left Transylvania with its unusually complex religious landscape, with four “received” religions and a precocious regime of religious toleration, the town was an important center, first of Lutheranism, then of Calvinism, and finally of anti-Trinitarianism (what would later come to be called Unitarianism).6 In Transylvania as a whole, the Reformation sharpened ethnoreligious distinctions, leaving the Saxons Lutheran and Hungarians Catholic, Calvinist, or Unitarian. In Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, however, the lines between German- and Hungarian-speakers were blurred. Saxons and Hungarians alike followed charismatic preacher Ferenc Dávid through Lutheranism and Calvinism to the radical denial of the dogma of the Trinity.7 Isolated both geographi3 Z. Vincze, “Kolozsvár története,” 9–11; Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 11–21; Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 77–94. 4 Z. Vincze, “Kolozsvár története,” 11–12, Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 21–22, Csetri, “Kolozsvár népessége,” 9; Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 103–4. 5 On the “national struggles” in Kolozsvár/Klausenburg during the late Middle Ages, see Lang, Die Nationalitätenkämpfe in Klausenburg. 6 On the complexities of the early modern period and reformation in Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, and the need to transcend the framework of nationalist historiography, see the brief essay by Szegedi, “A Premodern Kolozsvár.” 7 Ferenc Dávid, seen by Unitarians worldwide as a key innovator in the history of the faith and by Hungarians as the greatest figure of the Hungarian Reformation, was of mixed descent but considered himself a Saxon; Gáspar Heltai, a follower of Dávid who established the town’s first printing press in 1550, printed the first Hungarian-language Bible, and preached and printed largely in Hungarian, was also a Saxon by birth.

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91

cally and (as a result of this distinctive religious trajectory) institutionally from the major concentrations of Saxons in southern Transylvania, many Saxons eventually assimilated, over the course of several generations, to the Hungarian-speaking population. New migrants to the town were largely Hungarian-speaking; and the Hungarian language came gradually to be adopted by many Saxons. Kolozsvár became in this manner a largely Hungarian-speaking town, and would remain so through the middle of the twentieth century.8

Kolozsvár in Nationalizing Hungary Catastrophic fires, marauding armies, and subjection to Habsburg rule had deprived Kolozsvár of much of its wealth, municipal freedom, cultural centrality, political significance, and even population by the end of the seventeenth century, and it took most of the next century for the town to recover.9 Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the population and urban economy grew only slowly. Characteristic of this period was the emergence of a Hungarian public sphere, reflecting the newly awakened interest in Hungarian language and culture and a liberal ethos of improvement and reform: a “casino” opened in 1833 as a forum for public discussion; a permanent theater company was established; and several Hungarian-language newspapers and periodicals were founded.10 For the small Romanian-speaking population, the main institutional support was provided by Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches, established at the turn of the century.11 After the turmoil of the Revolution and civil war of 1848–49, the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid growth, economic dynamism, and infrastructural modernization.12 Growth accelerated after the Compromise of 1867 made Kolozsvár (along with the rest 8 A Lutheran church was re-established only in the late seventeenth century. On the decline of the Saxon population of Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, see Valjavec, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Südosteuropa, 247; Lang, Die Nationalitätenkämpfe in Klausenburg, 44–50, 71–72; Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 27, 30; Ernyei, “Kolozsvár a magyar szellemi életben,” 38. 9 Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 27–29; Csetri, “Kolozsvár népessége,” 12–13; Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 201–13. 10 On the Kolozsvár casino and, more generally, the social background and ethos of those involved in Transylvanian associations in the early nineteenth century, see Török, “The Informal Politics of Culture,” 68–75. On Kolozsvár society in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Sonkoly, Erdély városai, pp. 143–58; and see also Egyed, “Kolozsvár vonzása és vonzáskörzete,” 281–82. 11 Romanians comprised between 12 and 18 percent of the population during the nineteenth century. Apart from a handwritten literary newsletter, the first Romanian periodical appeared only in 1903. The only Romanian-language schools before 1918 were two church-run elementary schools (Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 344–45, 365–66). 12 On the Revolution and civil war of 1848–49 in Transylvania, see chapter 2, pp. 60ff.

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of Transylvania) an integral part of Hungary.13 The population more than tripled, from 17,000 in 1850 to 60,000 in 1910. A rail line to Budapest was completed in 1870, and soon rail service linked Kolozsvár to other Transylvanian towns and to Romania. Alongside the artisanal workshops that had long dominated the urban economy, numerous factories were established, most in food processing, alcohol and tobacco, agricultural machinery, building materials, and leather processing. Although most factories were small, four employed more than a hundred workers in 1910, and one (a cigarette factory) employed more than a thousand. Commercial and financial services flourished. Infrastructural improvements around the turn of the century included a telephone exchange, running water, a modern sewer system, and electric lighting.14 In recognition of the town’s growing importance, Hungary’s second modern university was established in Kolozsvár in 1872. This was intended to promote the integration of Transylvania into Hungary—to “cultivate through higher education the Hungarian spirit among the nations of Transylvania,” in the words of one contemporary observer.15 Demands of Romanian intellectuals for organization of the university along parallel Romanian and Hungarian lines were ignored, though a department of Romanian language was established with a single Romanian professor.16 In the last two decades before World War I, Romanian students—the great majority of them, like their Hungarian counterparts, studying law or medicine—comprised just over ten percent of the total number of students. At a time when Romanians comprised a majority of the total population of Transylvania, the Romanian student population remained relatively small; but Romanian students did comprise an important nucleus for nationalist activities.17 Although the countryside around Kolozsvár was predominantly Romanian-speaking, the town remained solidly Hungarian-speaking even as its population grew rapidly (tables 3.1 and 3.2).18 This was largely See chapter 2, pp. 63ff. Csetri, “Kolozsvár népessége,” 20–23; Z. Vincze, “Kolozsvár története,” 19–20; Pölöskei, “Kolozsvár a századfordulón,” 232; Makkai, “Kolozsvár,” 33–34; Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 285–309. 15 Quoted in Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” 84. On the choice of Kolozsvár for the university, see Karády and Nastasa˘, The University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, 24–27. 16 Demands for a Romanian university were first articulated during the Revolution of 1848; on this and the demand for parity with Hungarian in the new university in Kolozsvár, see Sigmirean, “Efforts to Create a Romanian System of Higher Education.” 17 Figures on students by mother tongue and language for each faculty of the university for selected years are provided in Sigmirean, “The Cluj University,” 48ff. Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” chapter 2, places these and other data in a wider social and political context. On Romanian students in Kolozsvár, see Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 277 ff. 18 The population of Kolozs county was 58 percent Romanian in 1910. Outside of Kolozsvár itself, the population of the county was two-thirds Romanian. 13 14

29,923 32,756 49,295 60,808 83,542 100,844 100,844 110,956 110,956 117,915 154,723 154,723 185,663 185,663 262,858 328,602 317,953

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920n 1930 1930n 1941 1941n 1948 1956 1956n 1966 1966n 1977n 1992n 2002n

3,855 3,226 6,039 7,562 28,274 34,836 34,895 10,029 9,814 47,321 74,623 74,033 105,185 104,914 173,003 248,572 252,433

Population 12.9 9.8 12.3 12.4 33.8 34.5 34.6 9.0 8.8 40.1 48.2 47.8 56.7 56.5 65.8 75.6 79.4

% 22,761 27,514 40,845 50,704 41,583 54,776 47,689 97,698 96,002 67,977 77,839 74,155 78,520 76,934 86,215 74,871 60,287

Population

Hungarian 76.1 84.0 82.9 83.4 49.8 54.3 47.3 88.1 86.5 57.6 50.3 47.9 42.3 41.4 32.8 22.8 19.0

% 1,423 1,336 1,784 1,676 2,073 2,702 2,500 1,825 1,606 360 1,115 990 1,337 1,333 1,480 1,149 734

Population

German 4.8 4.1 3.6 2.8 2.5 2.7 2.5 1.6 1.4 0.3 0.7 0.6 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.3 0.2

%

1,884 680 627 866 11,612 8,530 15,760 1,404 3,534 2,257 1,146 5,545 621 2,482 2,160 4,010 4,499

Population

Other 6.3 2.1 1.3 1.4 13.9 8.5 15.6 1.3 3.2 1.9 0.7 3.6 0.3 1.3 0.8 1.2 1.4

%

Source: Census data reported in Varga, ed., Erdély etnikai és felekezeti statisztikája (available online at http://www.kia.hu/konyvtar/erdely/erdstat/ cjetn.pdf); 2002 census figures are reported at http://adatbazis.mtaki.hungary.com/?mtaki_id=108439&settlement_name=. Some censuses collected data on mother tongue, others on ethnic nationality, others on both forms of identification. Data on ethnic nationality are marked here by an “n” following the year. The great majority of the “others” recorded in nationality data for 1920 and 1930 were Jews, most of whom spoke Hungarian.

Total

Year

Romanian

Table 3.1. Cluj Population by Ethnic Identification, 1880–2002

13.8 10.0 14.6 14.2 22.6 10.4 *** 6.6 5.8

By percentage 1880 1.5 1890 1.5 1900 2.0 1910 2.2 1930 11.8 1941 2.0

*** 1992 2002

*** 6.9 5.5

35.6 34.3 32.5 31.3 20.1 29.4

*** 22,575 17,540

10,652 11,248 16,041 19,021 20,291 32,629

Roman Catholic

*** 14.7 12.2

35.7 38.5 34.3 34.1 26.7 36.6

*** 48,156 38,779

10,680 12,621 16,895 20,726 26,919 40,605

Calvinist

*** 1.2 1.1

3.5 3.8 3.5 3.2 2.1 3.7

*** 4,049 3,369

1,034 1,237 1,704 1,921 2,137 4,124

Unitarian

*** 0.1 0.1

5.4 7.4 9.6 11.6 13.4 15.1

*** 340 227

1,601 2,414 4,730 7,046 13,504 16,763

Jewish

*** 4.8 6.3

4.6 4.5 3.6 3.4 3.2 2.8

*** 15,730 20,141

1,394 1,468 1,749 2,089 3,235 3,108

Other

*** 328,602 317,953

29,923 32,756 49,295 60,808 100,844 110,956

Total

Source: Census data reported in Varga, ed., Erdély etnikai és felekezeti statisztikája. Available online at http://www.kia.hu/konyvtar/erdely/ erdstat/cjfel.pdf; 2002 census figures are reported at http://adatbazis.mtaki.hungary.com/?mtaki_id=108439&settlement_name=. Censuses during the communist period did not collect data on religious affiliations.

*** 65.8 69.2

*** 21,677 18,484

*** 216,075 220,011

*** 1992 2002

Greek Catholic 4,128 3,279 7,208 8,646 22,816 11,530

Orthodox

Population 1880 434 1890 489 1900 968 1910 1,359 1930 11,942 1941 2,197

Year

Table 3.2. Cluj Population by Religious Affiliation, 1880–2002

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because of an ethnic selectivity in migration: Hungarians were drawn to the town in numbers disproportionate to their share in Kolozs county or in Transylvania as a whole.19 But it also reflected the fact that many Romanian-speakers who moved to Kolozsvár, or their children, ended up assimilating to the Hungarian-speaking majority. Apart from the few students of Romanian literature at the university, upwardly mobile Romanians in Kolozsvár had to study and work in an overwhelmingly Hungarian milieu: secondary and university education were available only in Hungarian, and Hungarian was the sole language of economic life.20 Throughout East Central Europe, the national struggle was intensifying during the half-century before World War I; and Hungary was a strongly, sometimes harshly nationalizing state during this time. But there were few signs of overt national struggle in Kolozsvár, and little need for harsh nationalizing measures. So long as Romanian migration to Kolozsvár remained modest, the state could rely on “natural” processes of assimilation and on the hegemonic status of Hungarian language and culture to preserve the town’s Hungarian character. And without a critical mass of Romanian inhabitants in town, the Romanian national movement could not undertake or even contemplate the sort of struggle for control of urban institutions that was underway in many other East Central European towns during the last half-century of Habsburg rule.21 Yet nationalist tensions did come occasionally to the surface. The university was one site of friction; the professor appointed to the Department of Romanian Language and Literature, Grigore Silas¸i, was dismissed in 1884 after Hungarian nationalist students mobilized aggressively against him.22 See Egyed, “Kolozsvár vonzása és vonzáskörzete,” 284–85. A Romanian journalist writing in the 1920s used the fictional example of Ion Pop to describe the assimilationist dangers upwardly mobile Romanians had faced in the Dualist era. The son of poor peasants whose success in school led him to study law in Kolozsvár, Ion Pop grew fond of Hungarian theater, music, and literature; married a Hungarian; had children who did not learn Romanian; became a successful lawyer; and even Magyarized his name, becoming Pap János (Codarcea, “Povestea lui Pap János”). One measure of assimilation comes from the 1910 census, which recorded 7,562 Romanians (12 percent of the population), but 10,005 members of “Romanian” churches (8,646 Greek Catholics and 1,359 Orthodox, comprising 14 percent and 2 percent, respectively, of the population). There were thus some 2,500 residents who belonged to “Romanian” churches but listed their mother tongue as Hungarian; many of these were probably people who had preserved their parents’ religious affiliation while assimilating linguistically (see tables 3.1 and 3.2). 21 See for example Jeremy King’s exemplary study of the Bohemian town of Budweis/ Budeˇjovice, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans. On Ödenburg/Sopron in western Hungary, see King, “Austria versus Hungary,” 168–75; on Prague, Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival; on Pressburg/Pozsony/Bratislava, today the capital of Slovakia, Babejová, Fin-De-Siècle Pressburg; on Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv in Galicia, Ther, “Chancen und Untergang einer multinationalen Stadt,” and Mick, “Nationalisierung in einer multiethnischen Stadt.” 22 The students objected to his lecturing in Romanian; to his leading role in the Iulia Society, which brought Romanian students together with the aim of promoting Romanian language and culture; and to a (very) indirect connection with the nationalist Romanian newspaper Tribuna, founded in 1884 in the southern Transylvanian town of Nagyszeben/Sibiu. (The professor 19 20

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A second and more substantial mobilization occurred in connection with the “Memorandum” movement, a major focus of Transylvanian Romanian nationalist politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the 1890s, Romanian National Party leaders drafted a Memorandum outlining Romanian national aspirations and presented it to the emperor in Vienna. Pressured by Hungarian nationalists, the public prosecutor in Cluj began a criminal investigation against party officials. As the trial opened in Cluj on May 7, 1894, a huge Romanian crowd from all over Transylvania marched through the town in protest.23 The proceedings culminated in the conviction and imprisonment of numerous members of the party’s executive committee.24 Just before the trial, the town council had announced a competition for a statue commemorating Kolozsvár’s most famous native son: the Renaissance-era King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, who was born in Kolozsvár in 1443. The monument was planned for the newly redesigned main square, from which the ramshackle shops that had encircled St. Michael’s Church for three hundred years had recently been cleared, transforming it into an elegant open plaza.25 The foundation stone was laid in 1896, as part of a grand countrywide millennial celebration of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin. Six years later, the monumental statue was unveiled in a ceremony attended by the highest dignitaries of the country, brought in by special train from Budapest.26 King Matthias, considered one of Hungary’s greatest rulers, had been celebrated for his military prowess, state-building efforts, and lavish patronage of humanist learning and the arts. A statue might have emphasized any of these aspects of his reign. And the ceremonial dedication might have highlighted the partly Romanian ancestry of Matthias as a gesture toward the region’s Romanian majority. Yet the design of the monument and the rhetoric of the ceremony expressed a triumphalist Hungarian nationalism. Sculptor János Fadrusz depicted the king and four warriors holding the appointed to replace Silas¸i angered nationally minded Romanians by rejecting the Daco-Roman continuity theory in his inaugural lecture.) See Sigmirean, “The Cluj University,” 42–44; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 278–80. On the Tribuna, see Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, 130ff.; Köpeczi, ed., History, 618–19. 23 Buzea, Clujul, 1919–1939, 51, puts the figure at 20,000, and Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 318–20, at 40,000. At the time, Cluj had only about 40,000 inhabitants, only about 5,000 of whom were Romanian-speakers. 24 On the Memorandum movement, see Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed, 135–49; Köpeczi, History, 618–22. A monument commemorating the leaders of the movement was erected just off the main square in 1994, marking the centennial anniversary of the trial; on the social uses of this monument, see plate 16c. 25 Gaal, Kolozsvár, 39–40. 26 On the commissioning and dedication of the statue, and its significance in the wider context of turn-of-the-century Hungarian politics, see Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 68–77. For an historical and sociological account of the symbolic politics of space in Cluj more generally, see Laza˘r, “Cluj 2003.”

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flags of neighboring states—Czech, Austrian, Turkish, and Moldavian—as trophies of military triumph.27 (The representation of the Moldavian flag would later provoke Romanian nationalist ire.)28 The trial of the Memorandists and the iconography and dedication of the statue of King Matthias exemplify the arrogance of turn-of-thecentury Hungarian nationalism; both testify to Hungarian insensitivity to Romanian national claims. Most Hungarians believed the national claims of Romanians and others could be repressed or ignored; subsequent developments would show just how wrong they were.

From Kolozsvár to Cluj Hungarian rule in Kolozsvár came to an end on December 24, 1918, when Romanian troops marched into the city.29 The change in sovereignty, as we observed in the preceding chapter, led to an abrupt reversal in nationalizing policies and practices. But in Cluj, as in Transylvania as a whole, the reversal was not symmetrical. Just as interwar Romania faced a different problem than Dualist Hungary in seeking to nationalize Transylvania, so, too, the question of nationalization presented itself in very different ways in Cluj. When Transylvania had been incorporated into Hungary in 1867, there had been no need for the state to adopt expressly nationalizing policies in Kolozsvár. The scant opportunities for Romanian-language education in Kolozsvár did of course reflect the educational policies of the nationalizing state. Yet since Kolozsvár was already overwhelmingly and securely Hungarian, nationalizing policies and practices were focused on other sites. Romanian authorities faced a very different situation. While Transylvania as a whole had a substantial Romanian majority, Romanians were only weakly represented in Transylvanian towns and in urban, middle-class occupations; nationalizing policies and practices were designed to remedy this. Cluj (along with other Transylvanian towns) now 27 The Hungarian press was equally triumphalist. A few days after the dedication, a newspaper article praised Fadrusz for capturing just the right qualities of Matthias: “Now we know who Mátyás was to us and who he was to the world. Everybody knows, the child, the servant, the shopkeeper, the magnate, whoever happens to pass through the main square of Kolozsvár. Organizer of armies, vanquisher of enemies, creator of Hungarian power in Central Europe . . . the leading knight of his time, a terrible and just emperor by virtue of his sword and his mind. This is the Mátyás resurrected by Fadrusz. And it is precisely this Mátyás that we need. Not the opulent ruler, not the scholar, not the founder of libraries, not the generous patron of the arts, not the builder of splendid palaces. These characteristics are valuable, too. . . . But what is needed is for the energy of power to reawaken within our national consciousness. The soul of our people must be filled with historical sentiments and with a sense of obligation to our historical calling (“Fadrusz János,” Ellenzék, October 16, 1902). 28 See below, pp. 100, 140. 29 Mócsy, The Effects of World War I, 35–36.

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became a key site and target of self-consciously nationalizing policies and practices. Some nationalizing policies had an immediate effect. There was a rapid turnover among public officials and other state employees.30 The Hungarian Nemzeti Színház (National Theater), a grand art nouveau building, was rechristened the Romanian Teatrul Nat¸ional. And the university was seized by Romanian authorities, with army units standing by, after the faculty refused an ultimatum demanding that they take an oath of loyalty to the Romanian state; it reopened as a Romanian institution in the fall of 1919 with a new professoriate and new student body, while most of the Hungarian faculty and many of the students moved to Hungary.31 In other domains, change was much more gradual. There was a substantial exodus of Hungarians (civil servants and students in particular) to Hungary in the first few years of the new regime, and a much larger influx of Romanians, including many from the Old Kingdom, eager to fill positions in the public sector. The town’s population grew from 60,000 in 1910 to 100,000 in 1930, with Romanians—whose numbers increased from just 7,500 in 1910 to 35,000 in 1930—accounting for 70 percent of the growth. Yet Hungarians remained a clear majority, comprising 54 percent of the population (by mother tongue) in 1930, as against 35 percent for Romanians.32 30 Mócsy notes, however, that some Hungarian employees were not replaced immediately, since trained Romanians were not always available to fill their positions (ibid., 44–48). 31 Romanian opinion was divided on the matter. Some proposed leaving the Hungarian university in place and establishing a new Romanian university alongside it; others favored the gradual nationalization of the existing university; still others advocated an immediate nationalization. This last view prevailed. On this controversy and other aspects of the nationalization of the university, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 219–27; Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” 127–31; Gaal, Egyetem a Farkas utcában, 85–87; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 579–87; Pus¸cas¸, “The Post-War Reorganization of the Cluj University,” 67–85. In response, the three “Hungarian” churches—Catholic, Calvinist, and Unitarian—sought jointly to establish another Hungarian university in Cluj, but Ministry of Education officials, heeding the arguments of those who pressed for a strongly nationalizing policy in Cluj, ruled that such an institution would have to be established in another town; in the end, nothing came of this project (Karády and Nastasa˘, The University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, 44; Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 579–80). In 1921, the Hungarian government officially re-established the Franz Joseph University in Szeged, a town close to Romania’s western border, where it attracted numerous students from Transylvania. On the move to Szeged, see Gaal, Egyetem a Farkas utcában, 92–106; on the Romanian government’s reaction to it, including ceasing to recognize degrees conferred from Hungarian universities, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 226–27. 32 See table 3.1, p. 93. The Romanian census asked about ethnocultural nationality as well as mother tongue, and Jews were counted as a separate nationality (which conveniently reduced the size of the Hungarian population). By nationality, the population was 47 percent Hungarian, 35 percent Romanian, and 13 percent Jewish, as well as 2.5 percent German and 1 percent Gypsy. Even the figures for mother tongue underestimate the size of the Hungarian-speaking majority, since 6.6 percent of the residents—or about half of those who identified as Jewish by nationality—were counted as Yiddish speakers, possibly reflecting pressure from Romanian census-takers, who may have sought to reduce statistically the number of Hungarian-speakers in Transylvania (Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania,” 171ff.). In the Dualist period, the large majority of Jews had identified as Hungarian by mother tongue.

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In the crucial domain of language, too, change was gradual— frustratingly so for Romanian nationalists. In official settings, Hungarian was immediately replaced by Romanian; and Hungarian schoolchildren— even those who continued to be educated in Hungarian schools—were now required to learn the new official language.33 Yet while language policies changed overnight, language practices and repertoires did not. The asymmetrical bilingualism that had prevailed under Hungarian rule— when all Romanians in Cluj knew Hungarian, yet virtually no Hungarians knew Romanian—was slow to change. Hungarian continued to be spoken in many workplaces and shops—and even in some public offices, as indicated by the signs enjoining clients (and officials) to speak Romanian.34 For nationalizers, the problem was not simply that Hungarians continued to use Hungarian; it was that many Romanians did as well.35 A local journalist complained in 1926 that Cluj was Romanian in name only; “in spirit,” it was still Kolozsvár and would remain a Hungarian city as long as Romanians continued to “avoid the Romanian Theater, shun Rega˘t¸eni [people from the Regat (Old Kingdom), that is, Moldavia and Wallachia], not read any Romanian newspapers, and remain content with [the Hungarian newspapers] Keleti Ujság in the morning and Ellenzék in the evening.”36 Another set of nationalizing measures sought to alter the symbolic geography of the town. Streets and squares were renamed after Romanian historical figures. Statues of Romanian heroes were commissioned. The most significant initiatives focused on the city’s symbolic and social center, the fo´´tér (main square), as it was called in Hungarian, now renamed Piat¸a Unirii (Union Square) to commemorate the unification of Transylvania with Romania. In an effort to neutralize the Hungarian nationalist iconography of the square, still dominated by Saint Michael’s Church and the monumental statue of Matthias Corvinus, a counter-statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf was placed opposite the 33 The structure of incentives changed as well. Before World War I, virtually no Hungarians had spoken Romanian. There had been no material incentive to learn Romanian, and no ideal incentive either, for Romanian had been considered by urban Hungarians to be a peasant language, lacking the sophistication needed for modern urban life. Hungarians now had an incentive to learn at least some Romanian, and those seeking higher education, professional careers, or simply a wider range of employment opportunities had an incentive to master the language. 34 Other enforcement efforts, too, testified to the resilience of Hungarian. In the late 1930s, for example, the police instructed shopkeepers, merchants, artisans, doctors, and lawyers that their commercial signs should be exclusively in Romanian, and sought to ensure that market vendors spoke Romanian (Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 455–56). 35 Some of the Romanians who migrated to Cluj in large numbers after the change of sovereignty were from the Old Kingdom, and knew no Hungarian. But the 1930 census data on religious affiliation suggest that migrants from the Old Kingdom (almost all of whom were Orthodox, while the large majority of Transylvanian Romanians were Greek Catholic) comprised no more than a third of the town’s population (see table 3.2, p. 94). And some of those who migrated to Cluj from the Old Kingdom no doubt learned some Hungarian. 36 Codarcea, “Kolozsvár-Cluj,” 738.

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statue of King Matthias in 1921; a copy of the famous Capitoline Wolf in Rome, this was seen as symbolizing the town’s Roman (and by extension Romanian) origins.37 In the same spirit, a new plaque was installed on the pedestal of the equestrian statue in 1932.38 The inscription, written by the great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, described King Matthias as “triumphant in battle, defeated only at Baia by his own nation, when he tried to conquer undefeated Moldavia.” This emphasized the Romanian (paternal) ancestry of the king; it also challenged the triumphalist imagery of the statue by representing Matthias as having been defeated by “his own nation,” that is, the Romanian principality of Moldavia.39 More conspicuously, construction was begun on a monumental Orthodox cathedral across from the (newly nationalized) Romanian National Theater. There were far more Greek Catholics than Orthodox Romanians in Cluj when the cathedral was begun (or even when it was completed in 1933). Yet since Orthodoxy was constitutionally enshrined as the “dominant church in the Romanian state,”40 the construction of an Orthodox church marked public space as “Romanian” more unambiguously than a Greek Catholic church would have done. The construc37 On the dedication of the statue of Romulus and Remus, see also Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 80–81. Addressing the Italian delegation that had presented the statue as a gift to the city, the local Romanian newspaper commented: “Our Latinity was stifled in the darkness of the barbarian invasions [a reference in this context to Magyars], a centurieslong night in the history of our people. Today, we bask in the light of your friendship. Our words themselves, which so much resemble Italian, express the consciousness that we are your brothers. . . . It is not Clujeni who greet you today from ancient Dacia but the descendants of Napoca, on whose foundation our city has risen. . . . Brothers, you are in your country, just as any Romanian setting foot in Italy feels he is stepping on holy ground” (“Inimi de frate,” Voint¸ a, September 29, 1921). 38 Some proposed moving the statue of Matthias Corvinus and erecting a “true Romanian monument” in its place. “No matter how great the artistic value of the statue and no matter how towering the historical figure of this king of Hungary,” argued a local newspaper in 1926, “we cannot tolerate that our national dignity be defied day after day by this symbol of Hungarian glory” (“Statuia lui Matia,” Patria, December 2, 1926). This was part of a broader discussion, involving in part the state Commission on Historic Monuments, on the need to move, destroy, or “correct” monuments built by the previous regime that injured the national feeling or dignity of the Romanian nation (Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 80). 39 The corrective plaque made it possible to claim the statue as a symbol of Romanian greatness: “In the midst of our city rises the great and haughty statue of Matei Corvin. The greatness of Matei, cast in bronze, undoubtedly belongs to the Romanian people from which he had risen. The haughtiness comes from the Hungarian people, whose greatest, best, and most just king he was. . . . [The inscription on the new plaque] is a late but welcome rehabilitation [of the historical truth,] a posthumous homage to Hungary’s greatest king, Romanian by origin. Now the statue of Matei Corvin is truly [i.e., truthfully] symbolic!”(“Învinsul de la Baia,” Patria, December 15, 1932). 40 Article 22 of the 1923 Constitution designated the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches as “Romanian churches,” but added that “the Orthodox church, being the religion of the great majority of Romanians, is the dominant church in the Romanian state.” On the “Orthodoxist” current of Romanian nationalist ideology during the interwar period, which marginalized the Greek Catholic Church, see Boia, History and Myth, 61–62.

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tion represented an effort to redefine the symbolic geography of the town by establishing a second, unambiguously “Romanian” center, a few blocks to the east of the old “Hungarian” center; as one contemporary commentator put it, the cathedral “conjured into existence a new town center.”41 In 1939, as the territorial frontiers of Greater Romania came to seem increasingly insecure, with growing concern over Hungarian claims on Transylvania and Soviet claims on Bessarabia, a book was published that chronicled and celebrated the development of the town under Romanian rule, and sought to counter the claims of “Hungarian revisionists” that Cluj had suffered under the new regime.42 The antirevisionist agenda remained largely implicit, yet the subtitle—“voicing the Romanian achievements”— signaled the book’s central concern to underscore the town’s Romanianness. Every aspect of economic, social, and cultural development and urban modernization since the change in sovereignty was applauded as a specifically Romanian success. Breaking with the nationalist laments about the slow pace of nationalization in Cluj and other Transylvanian towns, the book portrayed the transformation of Kolozsvár into Cluj as largely accomplished: “The Romanian specificity is more and more evident in the whole pulse of life in Cluj: in the bustle of holidays or that of everyday life, on the streets and in the markets, in public institutions and theater halls, where the Romanian language—increasingly purified of foreign and dialectal traces—is now benefiting from its long yearned-for primacy.”43 Yet this self-celebratory nationalist bravado masked growing anxiety about Hungarian territorial claims on Transylvania. The book itself cited data documenting continued Hungarian domination of local economic and (in certain respects) cultural life, including the fact that in 1939 there were five Hungarian daily newspapers and only one Romanian daily. As these and other indicators made clear, the Romanianness of the town—like the Romanian hold on Transylvania—was by no means securely established. Once Again in Hungary On September 11, 1940, two weeks after the Second Vienna Award assigned northern and eastern Transylvania to Hungary, the Hungarian army marched into Cluj—or rather, into Kolozsvár, as the town was now 41 See map 1, p. 2. The quotation is from Buzea, Clujul, 1919–1939, 72. Plans were made for a monumental statue to Romanian national hero Avram Iancu in front of the new cathedral, which would have provided a symbolic counterpart to the statue of King Matthias in the old main square (ibid., 82); but these remained unrealized until Mayor Funar resurrected the idea (see this volume, chapter 4, p. 142). 42 Ibid.; for “Hungarian revisionists,” see p. 28. 43 Ibid., 98–99.

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again officially known. A few days later, flag-waving Hungarians, some dressed in Hungarian peasant attire or sporting Hungarian national colors, turned out en masse to celebrate as Hungarian troops paraded through the streets, led by Regent Horthy on a white horse.44 Even today, some elderly Hungarians remember the occasion with emotion, one recalling it as “the most beautiful day of my life.” Of course, “liberation” to Hungarians meant “occupation” to Romanians. And though this would not become clear until later, it would mean death for most of the town’s Jews. The new border with Romania ran just 10 kilometers south of Kolozsvár. Romanian Clujeni fled to southern Transylvania in large numbers, while Hungarians from southern Transylvania poured into town. The census carried out by Hungarian authorities in 1941 documented a dramatic ethnodemographic reversal: Hungarians once again comprised the overwhelming majority, 88 percent by mother tongue, while the Romanian share plummeted to 9 percent.45 The question about nationality showed slightly fewer Hungarians (86.5 percent), since some of those who identified as Hungarian by mother tongue identified as Jewish by nationality; but the large majority of the nearly 17,000 residents who identified as Jewish by religion declared themselves Hungarian by nationality.46 After having been distinguished from Hungarians in the interwar Romanian censuses, Jews were now re-assimilated statistically to Hungarians by a regime that was otherwise committed to their dissimilation and exclusion.47 Case, “A City Between States,” 27. Although only 9 percent identified their nationality or mother tongue as Romanian, 13 percent identified their religion as Orthodox or Greek Catholic (see tables 3.1 and 3.2, pp. 93 and 94). This gap was not new; it had been characteristic of the period before World War I as well. In 1910, for example, 17 percent of the population belonged to traditional Romanian churches, while only 12 percent identified their mother tongue as Romanian. But the gap had disappeared in the 1930 census, before reappearing in 1941. This sharply fluctuating gap between membership of “Romanian” churches and declared Romanian nationality shows that official statistics about ethnic nationality and mother tongue do not record stable ethnodemographic or ethnolinguistic facts; they represent the social world in ways that reflect changing political circumstances. Censuses are often sites of overt nationalist struggles (see chapter 4, pp. 151ff.); but even when they are not, one should be skeptical of the illusory precision suggested by census figures. The nationality that people claim, or that is ascribed to them by others, is variable across time and circumstance; it is not an objective, enduring fact needing only to be registered. 46 Only 2,661 persons declared themselves Jewish by nationality, just 16 percent of the number identifying their religion as Jewish. 47 Case, “The Holocaust and the Transylvanian Question,” 16, notes the irony that the Hungarian census claimed Jews as Hungarians in 1940, while the Hungarian government denied Jews the permission to Hungarianize their names beginning in 1938. See also idem, “Navigating Identities,” which explores this tension between the opportunistic assimilation and exclusion of Jews in wartime Cluj by using archival evidence to examine a number of individual cases; she concludes that until mid-1943, state policy was inconsistent, leaving Jews with some room for maneuver. For a detailed study of the politics of names and name-changes and collective strategies of name-changes in Hungary, set in the context of changing understandings of nationhood, see Karády and Kozma, Név és Nemzet. 44 45

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Nationalizing measures carried out under Romanian rule were now reversed. The Hungarian university returned from its twenty-year “exile” in Szeged, while it was now the turn of the Romanian university to be exiled to Sibiu in southern Transylvania.48 The Romanian theater and opera also moved to Transylvanian towns that remained under Romanian sovereignty, while the Hungarian theater moved back into its old home. Most Romanian schools were closed; Romanian workers were laid off from factories; Romanian political parties and cultural associations were banned; and Romanian periodicals were shut down, with the exception of one daily paper that survived on the short leash of Hungarian censors. Streets and squares resumed their pre–World War I Hungarian names or, in some cases, were given new names befitting the political situation: King Ferdinand Street, leading from the railway station to the main square, was renamed after Admiral Horthy, while the most important “Romanian” square, where the new cathedral stood, became Hitler Square.49 The Romanian inscription on the statue of King Matthias was removed, the old Hungarian inscription restored, and the Capitoline Wolf dismantled. A newspaper published in Sibiu by the “Association of Refugees and Expellees from Occupied Transylvania” complained that this was part of a “plan to destroy any trace of Romanians in Cluj.”50 Meanwhile, the state sponsored searches for ancient “traces” of Hungarian settlement. Enlisting archaeology in the service of national claims, Hungarian authorities claimed in 1943 to have discovered six “Hungarian corpses” from the time of Árpád (early tenth century)—an occasion that called for a special visit to Kolozsvár by the Hungarian Minister of Defense and Propaganda. Hungarian archaeologists argued that the Roman civilization of antiquity had been succeeded by the Hungarian civilization of the Middle Ages, with no traces of any intervening civilization; this challenged the Romanian claims to local continuity between the Dacians and Romans of antiquity and contemporary Romanians. As a newspaper reported, the “priceless” find would provide an “eternal reminder that the indigenous inhabitants of Kolozsvár were Hungarians, and that it was they who founded the town and made it flourish.”51 Nationalizing measures vis-à-vis Romanians, however, were overshad48 On the former, see Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” 269–85, Gaal, Egyetem a Farkas utcában, 106–30; on the latter, Pus¸cas¸, “The Cluj (Sibiu) University.” 49 On the renationalization of space in 1940–44, see Case, “A City Between States,” chapter 3, and the illustrations in idem, appendix 1. 50 “Expulzarea Lupoaicei din Cluj,” Tribuna Asociat ¸iei Refugiat¸ilor s¸i Expulzat¸ilor din Ardealul Ocupat, January 8, 1941. 51 “Szombaton két ido ´´s férfi hamvait találták meg a Kolozsvár fo´´terén feltárt árpádkori temeto´´ben,” Keleti Ujság, August 8, 1943; see also Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrug, 82–83. On postcommunist uses of archaeology to support nationalist claims, see chapter 4, p. 141; on archaeology and nationalism more generally, see Kohl and Fawcett, “Archaeology in the Service of the State”; Kaiser, “Archaeology and Ideology in Southeast Europe.”

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owed by anti-Jewish measures—not least because so many Romanians had left town, while those who remained kept a low profile. In 1941, the census recorded 16,763 Jews in Kolozsvár, about 15 percent of the population. Like other Jews in northern Transylvania, as we indicated in the previous chapter, most had welcomed the change of sovereignty; many had even moved to Kolozsvár (and elsewhere in northern Transylvania) from the region that remained under Romanian rule, including neighboring Turda, just on the other side of the new border.52 Although tragically misguided in retrospect, this was understandable. The Jews of Cluj (like their counterparts in other Transylvanian cities) had been doubly targeted by Romanian nationalist measures during the interwar years. As Hungarian-speakers, they had been barred from attending Hungarian high schools, and Jewish schools were not allowed to teach in Hungarian. As Jews, they had been resented for their disproportionate representation in universities and the urban economy.53 In 1922, Romanian medical students at Cluj University had triggered a wave of violent antisemitic student demonstrations and university closures at all four Romanian universities by insisting that Jewish students provide their own “Jewish” cadavers to dissect.54 In 1927, Romanian nationalist students from Bucharest and Ias¸i, assembled for a congress in Oradea (a large and overwhelmingly Hungarian-speaking town near the Hungarian border, with the largest Jewish population in Transylvania), had gone on a rampage against Jewish and Hungarian targets. The students had then moved on to Cluj, breaking into synagogues, burning torah scrolls, and ransacking Jewish-owned shops.55 In the late 1930s, Jews had been further alarmed by the growing strength of the radical right.56 Whatever hopes and illusions Jews may have cherished about Hungarian rule were soon dashed. The anti-Jewish legislation already in effect in Hungary was immediately applied in northern Transylvania; further discriminatory legislation followed in 1941. Jewish organizations, sports clubs, and newspapers were disbanded; with a few exceptions, Jews were barred from the university, which had become a center of antisemitic agitation.57 Now that Jews were no longer considered Hungarian, the urban economy no longer seemed as Hungarian as it once had, and nationalizing measures sought to exclude Jews from key Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 69–70. Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 151–53, 173–74; Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 342–43. 54 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 269–71, Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 186. 55 Lo ´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 61–63; Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 186–87. 56 On the relation between the student movements and the rise of the Iron Guard, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, chapter 7. On Romanian antisemitism in the 1930s, see also Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. 57 Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania,” 179ff.; Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 175; Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 68–81. 52 53

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positions.58 Jewish merchants were evicted from their stalls in the marketplace, and from their shops on the main square.59 And in a variety of legal proceedings, individual Hungarian citizens used anti-Jewish legislation and the prevailing nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric to make claims to Jewish property or otherwise advance their private interests.60 The German occupation of Hungary began March 19, 1944; German troops entered Kolozsvár on March 27. Ghettoization commenced on May 3.61 Although the local Judenrat (Jewish Council) knew of the impending ghettoization by mid-April, and others learned in late April about ghettoizations elsewhere in Hungary, only a few hundred Jews fled to southern Transylvania.62 Within a week, 12,000 Jews had been collected in a brick factory in an industrial district in the northern part of town; ultimately, with the transfer of Jews from other, smaller ghettos, the Kolozsvár ghetto would hold nearly 18,000.63 Though some residents hid Jews, most did nothing, and some denounced Jews in hiding. Among major public figures, only Bishop Áron Márton condemned the ghettoization, warning Hungarians in a May 18 sermon not to abandon Jews.64 Even before the deportations, the homes of ghettoized Jews were looted, and over 1,500 Christians applied to take over some 400 businesses and shops.65 Deportations began May 25; over the next two weeks, in six transports, 16,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz.66

The Transition to Communist Rule The interlude of Hungarian rule came to an end on October 11, 1944, when Soviet and Romanian troops entered the city. But the reintegration into the Romanian state was delayed; the occupying Soviet forces 58 According to a Hungarian sketch of Kolozsvár society published in 1942, the current “task” was to wrest control of the property in the center of town that had gradually ended up in Jewish hands (Csizmadia, “Vázlat Kolozsvár társadalmáról,” 15–16). 59 Celebrating the latter development, the newspaper Magyar Nép observed that “a new life is beginning” on the square, “a Christian, Hungarian life” (quoted in Case, “A City Between States,” 94). 60 Case, “A City Between States,” chapter 3, documents this with data from court proceedings and other official sources (see for example 110–11). 61 On ghettoization in Kolozsvár, see Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 626–34, much of which draws on Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania.” For a more recent and more detailed account, see Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig (which includes a fairly detailed English summary at 342–46). 62 Lo ´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 101–2. 63 An unknown number of Kolozsvár Jews escaped deportation by virtue of having been conscripted earlier for compulsory labor service. Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania,” 194. 64 Ibid., 192–93; Márton’s sermon is reprinted in Lo ´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 257–61. 65 Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 634. 66 On the deportations of Hungarian Jews, see ibid., chapter 19; on Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz (the ultimate destination of almost all deported Hungarian Jews), see ibid., 780–92.

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suspended the Romanian administration in northern Transylvania just as it was beginning to be re-established. This was a time of great confusion and uncertainty. The withdrawal of the incipient Romanian administration led Hungarians to hope, and Romanians to fear, that Cluj and the rest of northern Transylvania might remain in Hungarian hands, or might at least become autonomous.67 Between November 1944 and March 1945, Cluj was the center of the provisional Soviet administration of northern Transylvania.68 Although Hungary had just been defeated, Hungarians played a central role in this provisional administration, and more generally in the strengthening of leftist forces in the region.69 Hungarians, Jews, and other minorities had been disproportionately drawn to the outlawed Romanian Communist Party during the interwar years, in part because of the party’s position on the national question and minority rights, and in part because of their concentration in the urban milieux from which communists drew their strength. After the war, many Hungarians joined the Communist Party, while many more joined the Hungarian Popular Alliance, a communistdominated mass organization.70 Communist leaders sought aggressively to extend party networks and expand membership, and they were aware of the need to “Romanianize” the party.71 But many Romanians in northern Transylvania resisted pressures to join the party; its traditional “alien” image was reinforced by its association with the occupying Soviet army, and by the salience of Hungarians in its ranks.72 Even as party membership expanded rapidly, it remained disproportionately Hungarian in the immediate aftermath of the war. In Cluj itself, in January 1946, only 826 out of 7,900 members were identified as ethnic Romanians.73 67 Sa ˘la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, 81ff., esp. 53–54 and 84–85, for rumors about the political status of Transylvania; see also Hitchins, Rumania, 512. 68 On this period, see Sa ˘ la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania; T¸aˆra˘u, “Viat¸ a˘ politica˘ s¸i problema locuint¸ elor”; Lonhart and T¸aˆra˘u, “Minorities and Communism in Transylvania.” 69 Sa ˘la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, 73. 70 On the Hungarian Popular Alliance during this transitional period, see Lonhart and T ¸aˆra˘u, “Minorities and Communism,” 33ff.; Sa˘la˘gean, Soviet Administration, 81ff.; G. Vincze, Illúziók és csalódások, 263–92. 71 See T ¸aˆra˘u, “Viat¸ a˘ politica˘ s¸i problema locuint¸ elor,” 320, on the acknowledged need to Romanianize the party. 72 Sa ˘la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, 121–22. On pressures to join the Communist Party, see ibid., 119–20. From a Romanian nationalist perspective, Hungarians entered the party en masse opportunistically, in an effort to preserve the privileged position they had reacquired during the war, and in order to demonstrate that they were “good communists” so as to increase the probability that the Soviet Union would make a favorable final decision on the status of Transylvania. While no doubt many Hungarians (and of course many Romanians as well) joined the party for opportunistic, careerist reasons, especially when membership was expanding very rapidly, with little scrutiny of applicants (just as happened elsewhere in Eastern Europe), it is also true that Hungarians and other minorities had good reasons to be disproportionately drawn to the Communist Party. 73 T ¸ aˆra˘u, “Viat¸ a˘ politica˘ s¸i problema locuint¸ elor,” 319.

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The Romanian administration was allowed to return to Cluj and the rest of northern Transylvania in March 1945 after King Michael yielded to Soviet pressure and appointed a communist-dominated government headed by Petru Groza. But political turbulence continued as communists struggled to consolidate their hold on power. The struggle was overtly ethnicized at certain moments; in the most serious incident, a large detachment of left-wing Hungarian workers from the Dermata shoe factory attacked a dormitory housing Romanian students who had staged nationalist and anticommunist demonstrations.74 Not all communists were Hungarian, of course, and most Hungarians were not communists. Yet political and ethnic divisions tended to coincide: Hungarians now leaned heavily to the left, while most Romanians supported the “historic” Romanian parties, especially the strongly nationalist and anticommunist National Peasant Party.75 The demographic balance in the city shifted sharply in the first few years after the war. The Romanian population nearly quintupled, from 10,000 in the Hungarian census of 1941 to 47,000 in the Romanian census of 1948.76 Many of these were returnees who had fled the town in 1940, but there were new migrants as well, and a new generation of students. Perhaps fifteen thousand Hungarians left the city, most of them, presumably, persons who had moved to Cluj during 1940–44, either from Hungary or from southern Transylvania.77 Yet many Hungarians who had come to Cluj during the war did not leave; the Hungarian exodus after the war was much smaller than its influx during the 74 Documents describing this incident from several (Romanian and Hungarian) perspectives are reprinted in A. Andreescu et al., eds. Maghiarii din Romaˆnia, 358–67. Armed Hungarian workers from Dermata also clashed with Romanian crowds on several other occasions; see ibid., 152–53, 155–56, 182–84, 207. 75 On the “doubling” of ethnic and political divisions, see Sa ˘ la˘gean, The Soviet Administration in Northern Transylvania, 57–58; L. T¸ îra˘u, “The Development of the Power Structures of the Romanian Communist Party,” 27–31. 76 See table 3.1, p. 93. Since these censuses were carried out in radically different political circumstances, some of the change may have reflected shifts in self-identification. Thus some people of mixed ancestry, or some long-resident Romanian Clujeni with fluent Hungarian, might have identified as Hungarian in the 1941 census, and then reidentified as Romanian after the war. 77 In October 1944, in the days immediately following the arrival of Soviet troops, a substantial number of Hungarian men were rounded up on the charge of having been fascist partisans and deported to Soviet labor camps. G. Vincze, “A romániai magyar kisebbség történeti kronológiája,” estimates the number at 3,000–5,000, and claims that few returned. The 1941 census reported 98,000 Hungarians by mother tongue, the 1948 census 68,000. Since almost all of the 17,000 Jews in Cluj in 1941 had identified their mother tongue as Hungarian (only about 800 indicated Yiddish), a substantial fraction of the decline recorded by the census in the Hungarian population between 1941 and 1948 reflects the deportation of the Jews rather than the postwar departure of non-Jewish Hungarians. It is not known precisely how many Jews from Cluj survived the deportation and returned to town. Referring to northern Transylvania as a whole, Vago, in “Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania,” 210, estimates that between 25,000 and 45,000 survived (between 15 and 28 percent of the prewar Jewish population). Many survivors emigrated shortly after the war; others moved within Transylvania, becoming more concentrated in the cities and towns, including Cluj (ibid.). Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 210, estimates that there were 6,500

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war.78 As a result, Hungarians not only remained in the majority, but their share of the population was higher in 1948 than in 1930.79 The early phase of communist rule was brutal, but the brutality was not directed against Hungarians in particular (though it was of course directed against Hungarians as well). On linguistic, cultural, and educational matters, as we observed in chapter 2, the regime followed the dictates of Soviet nationality policy, which prescribed native-language schooling and cultural institutions for all “co-inhabiting nationalities,” in the first instance for Hungarians. A small but symbolically resonant indicator of this in Cluj concerned the plaque on the statue of Matthias Corvinus. Instead of reinstalling the controversial Romanian “history-correcting” plaque, the authorities replaced the Hungarian Mátyás Király in 1945 with its Latin equivalent, Matthias Rex.80 More significant in everyday life was the official toleration, even encouragement, of bilingualism. Bilingual signs were common; Hungarian could be spoken freely, even in public offices. The city’s many streets bearing the names of Hungarians were not immediately renamed—except, of course, those bearing the names of politically dis-

Jews in Cluj in 1947, many of them newcomers to town. Subsequent censuses reported rapidly declining numbers of Jews by nationality. By the time the first postcommunist census asked again about religion, only a few hundred Jews remained. On the reconstruction of Jewish institutional life in Cluj immediately after the war, see Lo´´wy, A téglagyártól a tehervonatig, 209–16. 78 In the context of a swelling population and an acute housing shortage, struggles over the right to reside in the city were ethnicized. Romanians complained that Hungarians who moved to the town from Hungary in 1940–44, as well as local Hungarians who held positions in the Horthy regime, were being allowed to remain in town, while newly arrived Romanian migrants were not (T¸aˆra˘u, “Viat¸a˘ politica˘ s¸i problema locuint¸elor,” 320–23). 79 In 1930, Hungarians comprised 54 percent of the population by nationality, 47 percent by mother tongue; in 1948, they comprised 58 percent by mother tongue (see table 3.1, p. 93). Although the data are derived from different questions, the difference between the 47 percent share by nationality in 1930 and the 58 percent share by mother tongue in 1948 probably roughly represents the magnitude of the Hungarian net gain between 1930 and 1948, attributable to the only partially reversed Hungarian influx of 1940–44. The 1930 47 percent share— which no doubt declined somewhat over the course of the next decade—represents roughly the number of non-Jewish Hungarians; regardless of their mother tongue or feelings of national identification, Jews were strongly encouraged in the 1930 census to declare their nationality as Jewish, and the fact that 13 percent of the Cluj population did so suggests that the large majority complied. The 58 percent claiming Hungarian as their mother tongue in 1948 no doubt includes some Jews, but not more than a few thousand at most. 80 Lo ´´wy, Demeter, and Asztalos, Ko´´be írt Kolozsvár, 209. For later disputes over the plaque and the statue, see chapter 4, pp. 140, 142–43. In a similar spirit, the Capitoline Wolf was not reinstalled in front of the statue of King Matthias; it was kept in storage until 1955, then installed by the entrance to the university. In 1975, it was moved to another location, just off the corner of the main square, only to be relegated to the museum when the monument to the Memorandum movement was erected on that site in 1994 (see plates 16c–d). Proposals by Mayor Funar to reinstall the statue opposite King Matthias remained unrealized, though it was finally placed in 2002 on the promenade in the center of the boulevard linking the two main squares (see plate 14a). On the vicissitudes of this statue, see Tamarkin, “Space War.”

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credited figures. Elderly Hungarians recall a celebrated match of Hungary’s legendary soccer team of the early 1950s being broadcast on loudspeakers in the city center. Church schools were taken over by the state in 1948, but they continued to offer instruction in Hungarian. The most important local manifestation of Soviet nationality policy was the decision to establish a new Hungarian university alongside the Romanian university that returned to Cluj from its wartime exile in Sibiu. Between 1945 and 1959, the two universities functioned side by side. This was scarcely a golden age for universities: they were under strict political and ideological supervision after 1948, and numerous professors were purged.81 Yet many Hungarian intellectuals recall the organization of intellectual life along parallel, ethnically defined lines during this era with a certain nostalgia. The Romanianization of Cluj In Cluj as elsewhere in Transylvania, 1956 marked an important turn away from the internationalism of the first years of communist rule. During the uprising in Hungary, party leaders had become alarmed by the cross-border sympathies and interests of Transylvanian Hungarians. In this context, the Hungarian Bolyai University was seen as a dangerous incubator of separatist tendencies.82 In 1959, a carefully orchestrated campaign, framed so as to appear to have originated from the leaders of the Bolyai University themselves, led to its merger with the Romanian Babes¸ University into a single institution with parallel Hungarian and Romanian sections. The merger was not only a major symbolic blow for Hungarian intellectuals, but was seen as undermining the institutional infrastructure that permitted the reproduction over time of a cohesive, self-consciously Hungarian cultural and intellectual elite.83 The revival of nationalist discourse that began in the late 1960s found concentrated expression in Cluj in October 1974, when the town celebrated the 1850th anniversary of the promotion of ancient Napoca to the rank of a Roman municipium.84 Ceaus¸escu himself was present for the occasion, emphasizing in his speech the “highly developed civiliza81 See Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” 298–328; G. Vincze, Illúziók és csalódások, 225–51. 82 Already in the early 1950s, authorities sought to weaken the institutional base of Hungarians in Cluj by transferring a series of Hungarian cultural institutions to other towns. In the face of local opposition, the plans were abandoned after just two institutions—the Academy of Dramatic Art and a literary journal—were transferred (Lázár, “Memorandum,” 101–2). 83 Pálfy, “National Controversy in the Transylvanian Academe,” 327–28; Illyés, National Minorities in Romania, 177–78; G. Vincze, Illúziók és csalódások, 251–60. 84 This paragraph is based on Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 84ff.; see also Tamarkin, “History, Culture, Collective Memory,” 20–21.

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tion that existed on this ground already at the time of the Dacians, and later, the Romans.” The anniversary was used to highlight the putative continuity between the Dacian and Roman inhabitants of the ancient town and the Romanian inhabitants of the contemporary city. S¸tefan Pascu, a leading (and politically well-connected) historian, whose hefty Istoria Clujului (History of Cluj) appeared the same year, gave a condensed—and rather caricatural—version of this argument in a lead article in the local paper on the day of the celebration: Its name was Napoca and it was inhabited by Dacians, men with hair waving in the wind and women with beautiful faces and clean clothes. And it remained Napoca when Roman colonists—peasants and artisans, veterans and merchants—settled next to the Dacians. Fraternization and mixing ensued; a new history came into being. . . . [Later on,] the indigenous Romanians, together with other newcomers, Hungarians and Germans, rebuilt the fortress into a city, and gave it the name Clus, [meaning] closed settlement in the language—closely related to vernacular Latin—spoken by the inhabitants.85 On this argument, Romanians count as “indigenous”—in Cluj and in Transylvania as a whole—because they are direct descendents of the indigenous Dacians (and the Romans with whom the Dacian population fused); Hungarians and Germans, by contrast, are “newcomers.” The anniversary provided an occasion to inscribe the continuity thesis into the very name of the city, to which “Napoca” was officially appended. Cluj-Napoca remains the official name today, though it is seldom used in everyday talk. Discourse, however, was not decisive in the Romanianization of Cluj. During the interwar period, Romanian nationalist discourse centered on the need to nationalize the cities and towns of Transylvania, and government policies sought to promote this process; yet the cities and towns remained dominated by Hungarians, Germans, and Jews. Under communism, nationalist discourse did not focus specifically on nationalizing the cities and towns;86 yet outside the Szekler area, the urban landscape of Transylvania was in fact thoroughly nationalized. A glance at census figures renders the postwar nationalization of Cluj in sharp relief.87 In 1910, Hungarian-speakers had comprised 83 percent, Romanian-speakers a mere 12 percent of the population. Officially, Kolozsvár became Cluj after World War I; but in everyday life, it re“Împreuna˘ cu t¸ara,” Fa˘clia, October 16, 1974. The discourse on homogenization and systematization, to be sure, could be read as having implications for the nationalization of the cities and towns. 87 See table 3.1, p. 93. 85 86

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mained a largely Hungarian-speaking town throughout the interwar period, and well into the postwar period of communist rule. Yet by century’s end, Romanians comprised 80 percent of the population, nearly as large as Hungarians’ share at the beginning of the century. To understand how Cluj became a Romanian city, we need to shift our attention from nationalist ideology and directly nationalizing policies and practices to underlying demographic processes, especially migration.88 Of paramount importance in the first half of the century were the massive inflows and outflows that immediately followed changes in sovereignty. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Romanians nearly quadrupled, from 7,500 to 28,000; almost all of this influx, as well as a substantial Hungarian exodus, occurred after World War I. In 1940, the pattern was the opposite, with Romanians departing en masse and Hungarians returning; in 1944, the flows reversed once more. From this point on, however, migration assumed a very different form. In place of the sudden, convulsive flows that followed changes in sovereignty, a steady, sustained influx over the course of more than three decades decisively altered the town’s ethnic demography. In 1948, Romanians comprised only 40 percent of the population; by 1992, they comprised 75 percent. This change occurred not through Hungarians leaving the city—except to a certain extent in the late 1980s and early 1990s—but through Romanians moving to Cluj at much higher rates than Hungarians. As figure 3.3 shows, the Romanian population increased more than fivefold over this period, the Hungarian population barely at all. This dramatic change did not result in the first instance from nationalizing policies. As we indicated in the preceding chapter, it followed from the economic policy of the regime, which was committed to the rapid development of industry, and heavy industry in particular. In a centrally planned economy, of course, decisions about the location of industry, and about the recruitment of workers, are not left to the decentralized workings of markets, but are matters of political or bureaucratic decision. Many Cluj Hungarians (as well as Hungarian scholars) believe that the regime sought deliberately to Romanianize Cluj (and other Transylvanian towns) by building factories and resettling Romanians—in particular Romanians from beyond the Carpathians—to fill the new jobs.89 Yet this view requires qualification. The Ceaus¸escu regime did seek to alter the ethnic composition of Transylvanian towns; but this was not a consistent or 88 In addition to migration, intergenerational assimilation as a result of intermarriage has also played a role in the Romanianization of Cluj, as have differential fertility rates and differing age structures of Romanians and Hungarians. But migration has been the decisive factor over the last century as a whole. We address the contribution of assimilation to ethnodemographic change in chapter 9, pp. 297ff. 89 See for example Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, “Memorandum on Romania’s Admission to the Council of Europe.”

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had simply reflected the rural ethnic demography of Cluj County, or of Transylvania as a whole, Romanianization would have proceeded somewhat less rapidly. But in the long term, the Romanianization of Cluj was an inevitable concomitant of urbanization and industrialization; it was part of the long-term process of the nationalization of the “alien” towns by the surrounding countryside that, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, was characteristic of the region as a whole. Industrial development was rapid and intensive in Cluj after the war. Previously, small and medium-sized factories had been scattered throughout the town and along its perimeter. Now, a large industrial district took shape, stretching for nearly ten kilometers along the railroad tracks on the north side of town.92 The traditional food- and leather-processing sectors were overtaken by machinery and metal-processing, which accounted for 35 percent of the city’s industrial production in the early 1970s, double its share in 1950.93 Many plants employed more than a thousand workers, two eventually as many as 10,000. By 1970, 40 percent of employed Clujeni were industrial workers.94 Most were newcomers who had recently arrived in Cluj from nearby villages, from elsewhere in Transylvania, or (for a small but growing minority) from beyond the Carpathians. Cluj was physically and socially transformed by this influx. New districts of closely spaced four- to twelve-story box-shaped apartment blocks now surrounded the old center. By the time construction was completed in the mid-1980s, these districts were home to perhaps two-thirds of the town’s population (map 7).95 The large majority of the newcomers were Romanian; almost all came to Cluj from villages or small towns. For the newcomers, geographic mobility meant social mobility as well. Many of the newly recruited workers were given flats in the new apartment blocks; for those who had previously lacked basic amenities, a modern flat with running water, flush toilets, and electricity was an important status symbol. Industrial work, moreover, was experienced as a step up from the collective farm. Factories were more than workplaces; they organized social clubs, See plate 19. Pascu, Istoria Clujului, 457. Ibid., 447. 95 As in other Romanian cities and towns, the new districts exhibit a drab uniformity to the outside observer: row upon row of apartment blocks with little or no green space in between (see plates 18b, 20). And today many of them are quite dilapidated. Yet when the apartment blocks were first built, the prospect of a flat in one was attractive to many, especially to migrants from the countryside, but also to people in town who did not have their own flat or who were living in run-down quarters. Locals drew (and draw) distinctions among the new districts according to the physical quality of the construction and the perceived social quality of the residents. In Cluj, the older, smaller apartment block neighborhoods, situated closer to the center, with betterconstructed buildings and larger apartments, are generally preferred to the newer, larger neighborhoods, more distant from the center, with greater densities, less vegetation, more poorly constructed buildings, and smaller apartments. 92 93 94

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From this perspective, all that was wrong with the new Cluj was symbolized by Ma˘na˘s¸tur, the largest of the new apartment block districts, home to nearly 100,000 residents. Ma˘na˘s¸tur was sometimes called Satele Unite (the United Villages) by these long-standing urbanites; the nickname exploited the punning resemblance to Statele Unite (United States), and denied Ma˘na˘s¸tur “urban” status by denigrating it as a cluster of villages.97 Yet the problem was not confined to Ma˘na˘s¸tur. The forced tempo of industrialization and urbanization, they felt, had made Cluj as a whole less urban, and certainly less urbane. In the words of one elderly Romanian, Cluj had been transformed “into a big village.” Yet while Romanian and Hungarian “old Clujeni” could agree in lamenting the eclipse of the old Cluj, they experienced that eclipse in sharply differing ways. What Romanians interpreted in social or civilizational terms, as the colonization of the town by the countryside, Hungarians saw in ethnic terms, as the colonization of a Hungarian town by the Romanian countryside. This ethnicized understanding of the postwar history of Cluj is widely shared by Hungarians old enough to have experienced the transformation firsthand. A sixtyish Hungarian woman who worked companionably for many years with Romanian colleagues and speaks Romanian at home with her Romanian daughter-in-law gave voice to this view while reminiscing about her childhood. “The Ursus restaurant, the way it used to be,” she recalled, “they destroyed it and it turned into this miserable self-service joint, where people eat off a tray.” This seemingly ethnically neutral memory metonymically evoked the transformation of Cluj into an uncivilized place, and without any transition, she launched into an ethnicized account of the transformation: “And then the Romanians really multiplied. It was something terrible the way they flowed in from everywhere, from villages, from towns, from everywhere in the south. Ceaus¸escu really wasn’t stupid, because he wheedled them into coming to Transylvania. [ . . . ] And so gradually the scales were reversed.” Even cruder was a young Hungarian worker’s account, in which the newcomers were cast as Romanians and as peasants, social and ethnic categories doubling one another: Those who came from the villages, they were all Romanians. [ . . . ] I saw for instance—not far from here—they made a [vegetable] gar97 This image survived into the postcommunist period, when Ma ˘ na˘s¸tur and its allegedly uncultivated residents were seen as the social base of Mayor Funar’s electoral support. In accounting for nationalist politics, self-consciously “urbane” long-term residents would refer derisively to Funar s¸i Ma˘na˘s¸turenii (Funar and the residents of Ma˘na˘s¸tur). On the communist and postcommunist history and development of Ma˘na˘s¸tur, see Troc, “Dupa˘ blocuri”; on the complexity of social and ethnic self-identifications of the residents of the district, see Belkis et al., “Construirea urbana˘, sociala˘ s¸i simbolica˘ a cartierului Ma˘na˘s¸tur.” On the distinction—at once spatial, social, and symbolic—between center and periphery in Cluj, see Laza˘r, “Cluj 2003.”

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den on the roof of the apartment building. It’s still there, tomatoes, cabbages, on top of a 4-story building. There are still beans growing there. Those stupid peasants, they can’t live without this. I can’t figure out why the roof didn’t leak. They carried the water up there, and the soil too. I don’t know how many times they showed it on TV, how they kept pigs in the bathroom. The rooftop garden, a sign of urban sophistication in other contexts, is here taken to indicate just the opposite. The experience of ethnic exclusion was particularly marked in industry. Hungarians had dominated the industrial working class, and especially the ranks of skilled workers, in the early postwar years; they had also occupied most of the managerial positions in factories.98 By the mid 1970s, the situation had been reversed. “They kept bringing in the Romanians,” one elderly Hungarian worker recalled. “If somebody quit, there were two Romanians to take his place right away.” Hungarians felt that their exclusion was politically motivated, that highly skilled Hungarians were being replaced by less-skilled Romanians. With the change in workforce, the language of the factory changed as well, as a retired technician recalled: When I started working there, there were 300 employees, and there weren’t even ten Romanians. [ . . . ] When I came in 1954, the technical documentation was still in Hungarian, the meetings were in Hungarian, and Hungarians were in different [managerial] positions. After that, under the direction of a Romanian Jew, the factory was Romanianized—the documentation, the meetings, everything slowly changed to Romanian. For a while the director was still Hungarian, but like a good communist, he continued the Romanianization. Language patterns outside the workplace changed as well. In the first two postwar decades, Hungarian remained widely used in everyday life, even in public offices. Many shops displayed signs in Romanian and Hungarian, and shopkeepers would address customers with poftit¸i and tessék— “Can I help you?”—in both Romanian and Hungarian. One elderly Hungarian recalled how this changed in the mid 1960s: “Up until 1965, every grocery store, inside and out, had signs that said alimentara˘ in Romanian and élelmiszérüzlet in Hungarian. And then in ’65, I just noticed that they disappeared, the Hungarian signs, from the stores, you know?” Gradually, Romanian became the “default” language of everyday life. 98 This was a legacy of their domination of the industrial sector throughout the interwar period. In 1930, Romanians comprised 65 percent of public-sector employees in Cluj, but only about 20 percent of those employed in industry and commerce.

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In the 1980s, however, the experience of ethnic displacement and marginalization was more attenuated. The generation born after 1940 had no personal memories of Hungarian rule; and the generation born after 1965 had grown up in an already industrialized and Romanianized city. More importantly, as everyday life became increasingly difficult during the final decade of the Ceaus¸escu regime, as people spent endless hours standing in lines, and struggled to cope with the erratic availability of heat and electricity, ethnicity came to seem less important. The most salient we/they distinction was between ordinary people and the universally hated regime, not between Hungarians and Romanians.99 Retrospectively describing her friendly relations with Romanian colleagues in an ethnically mixed workplace in the 1980s, the sixtyish Hungarian woman quoted above remarked that she then “never imagined that it would burst out like it did, this nationalism [of the 1990s]. We all got along well, we never argued, or if we argued, it was always about something completely banal, never because we were Romanian or Hungarian. We were all depressed, we were all oppressed, we were all exploited, and so we were all in it together.” Despite the thoroughgoing Romanianization of Cluj, Hungarians were protected, to some extent, by their sheer numbers. Census figures showed more Hungarians in Cluj in 1977 than at any other time except 1941, and though these numbers declined thereafter, there were still at least 50 percent more Hungarians in Cluj at the end of the Ceaus¸escu regime than there had been before World War I. And until the 1980s, more Hungarians lived in Cluj than in any other Transylvanian town.100 This concentration made it easier for church- and school-based ethnic networks to survive. A Hungarian-language daily newspaper was published throughout the communist period. And other ethnically based cultural institutions, including a Hungarian theater, opera, and puppet theater, remained in operation. Hungarian schools continued to exist as well, though they came under pressure. The vicissitudes of the town’s three traditional elite Hungarianlanguage high schools illustrate both the precarious survival and the considerable erosion of the Hungarian school system. The schools were taken over by the state in 1948. One remained an academically oriented Hungarian high school until the mid-1980s, when Romanian-language sections were introduced, and a Romanian principal was appointed. A second was converted (like many other formerly academic high schools) into an industrial high school in 1977; Romanian-language sections 99 The distinction between ordinary people and “those on top” or “those in power” remains salient today; see chapter 6, pp.196, 205–6, and chapter 12, p. 335. 100 By 1992, Ta ˆ rgu-Mures¸ had a larger Hungarian population than Cluj, and that of Oradea was about the same size.

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were introduced there, too, in the mid-1980s. The third was demoted to a general school (grades 1–8) in 1977, and acquired Romanian sections in the 1980s. Hungarian schools and sections were Hungarian only in form; the curriculum was a vehicle for socialist and Romanian nationalist indoctrination. Yet the form mattered; it enabled Hungarian networks to reproduce themselves. It is no accident that it was precisely in Cluj—as well as in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ and Bucharest, the other main sites of institutionalized Hungarian networks—that Hungarians began to mobilize within a few hours of the fall of Ceaus¸escu.101 101

See chapter 4, pp. 122ff.

Chapter 4




CLUJ AFTER CEAUS¸ESCU

As the extraordinary year 1989 drew to a close, Romania seemed to have escaped the cascade of changes that had been sweeping the region. Most people in Romania were at least dimly aware of those momentous changes. They had learned of the negotiated transition underway in Hungary; of the surge of democratic and nationalist mobilization in Yugoslavia; of the burgeoning protests in the German Democratic Republic in September and October, and the opening of the Berlin Wall in early November; of the burgeoning protests in Czechoslovakia that led to the collapse of the regime in late November; and of the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria. They were aware that the Ceaus¸escu regime was more isolated than ever, and many sensed that the regime was finally vulnerable. But the regime maintained a tight, indeed a tightening, grip. Two years earlier, workers at a truck factory in Bras¸ov had rebelled, chanting antiregime slogans and ransacking local party offices; but since the crushing of that localized uprising, there had been no further coordinated protests. There was no substantial dissident movement, and the “sultanistic” style of Ceaus¸escu’s leadership provided no space for a reform communist movement to emerge.1 The turmoil that swept Ceaus¸escu from power began in Timis¸oara, a midsized multiethnic city near Romania’s western borders with both Hungary and Serbia.2 The catalyst was a protest by the parishioners of the local Calvinist church against the attempt by the authorities to evict Pastor László To´´kés from his church-owned residence. (To´´kés had used his pulpit—and his access to the foreign, especially Hungarian, press—to criticize the regime for its notorious rural “systematization” policy and 1 The few dissidents were weak and isolated not only by comparison with Poland and Hungary, but by comparison with Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union: see Verdery, National Ideology, 310–11; Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics, 211–12. On the importance of the “sultanistic” quality of the Ceaus¸escu regime in explaining the peculiarity, in comparative perspective, of the Romanian transition, see Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, chapter 18 (and on the definition of “sultanism,” 51–54). On the limited significance of samizdat publication under Ceaus¸escu, see Lo´´rincz, “Ambivalent Discourse in Eastern Europe,” 163–64. 2 The following account of events in Timis ¸ oara and Bucharest draws on Socor, “Pastor Toekes and the Outbreak of the Revolution in Timis¸oara”; Calinescu and Tismaneanu, “The 1989 Revolution and Romania’s Future”; Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; R. Hall, “Theories of Collective Action and Revolution”; and Rady, Romania in Turmoil.

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its human rights violations).3 The initial group of a few hundred ethnic Hungarian parishioners, who formed a human chain outside Pastor To´´kés’s residence on December 15, swelled that evening and the next day as many others, mainly Romanian, joined the crowd and marched through the city center, voicing their support for To´´kés but also chanting anti-Ceaus¸escu slogans.4 Crowds grew further on the evening of December 16 and the following day, as thousands more students and workers joined the protesters and demanded an end to the dictatorship. Under direct orders from Ceaus¸escu, army and Securitate forces cracked down on December 17 and 18, leaving about a hundred dead. News of the protests, and rumors about their bloody repression, spread quickly. Believing the situation to be under control, Ceaus¸escu left the country December 18 for an official visit to Iran. But protests resumed in Timis¸oara, and on December 20, the army withdrew from its positions in the city center, prompting an enormous demonstration that evening. When Ceaus¸escu returned that same day, he delivered a televised speech blaming the continuing unrest on “hooligans,” irredentists, and foreign espionage circles, and threatening to shoot protesters. The next morning he organized a huge rally in Bucharest, seeking, in timeworn communist fashion, to demonstrate support for the regime. Yet as a stunned television audience nationwide watched, orchestrated chanting of the prescribed slogan—Ceaus¸escu s¸i poporul (Ceaus¸escu and the people)—gave way to Ceaus¸escu dictatorul (Ceaus¸escu the dictator). In the confusion, the live broadcast continued for nearly three minutes before being cut off. For millions of viewers, this was an unmistakable sign that Ceaus¸escu was no longer in control; for many, it was also a signal to take to the streets. The revolution came to Cluj, as to many other cities, that afternoon.5 In the preceding days, most Clujeni had become aware of the events in Timis¸oara, if only in vague and confused ways, owing to fragmentary and conflicting reports. After seeing Ceaus¸escu shouted down in Bucharest, they were emboldened to join protests themselves. A machinist from a large factory on the outskirts of town recalled spreading the word among his colleagues: Up in the planning office, there was this engineer, and he came up to me and told me that everyone was organizing, from all the factories, 3 At the behest of the regime, To ´´kés’s supervisor in the church had sought to transfer him to a remote parish in March 1989, but To´´kés had contested the legality of the transfer. Matters came to a head in December, after To´´kés’s second legal appeal had failed. It was the regime’s announced intention to evict him from his church residence on December 15 that prompted parishioners to take to the streets. 4 As we have observed elsewhere, adherents of the Calvinist Church in Transylvania are almost exclusively Hungarian. 5 Feischmidt and Grancea were in Cluj at the time; this account relies on their own memories of the events as well as on our interviews and group discussions.

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and they were going to protest, over at the main square. [ . . . ] He told me he was afraid, but he says to me, he says I know everyone in the factory, and so I should be the one to tell everyone, I should go and tell everyone that we’ll go [to the square] and shout “Down with Ceaus¸escu!” [ . . . ] For two hours I went around, I went up to everyone individually, “Listen up, at 2:20 we’re meeting in front of the factory.” I’m telling you, the whole section, the whole factory was waiting there. In the meantime, a small crowd had gathered in the main square; some young men confronted lines of soldiers in front of the university bookstore, removing their shirts in a symbolic gesture. Suddenly, shots were fired, the crowd dispersed, and several bodies lay on the pavement.6 Hearing the shooting, but unaware what had happened, others converged on the square. Confusion reigned throughout the afternoon and evening. There was sporadic shooting in different parts of the city. A young woman recalled that “you couldn’t tell who was shooting, [ . . . ] what was happening. It was chaos: people were running, you’re going down the street and everyone around you is running, you don’t know what’s happening, as if they were making a movie and you’re in it.” Many Clujeni could hear shooting that night; the next morning there was still much confusion, and rumors were rampant. In the main square, people gathered to stare at the blood on the pavement. Crowds of protesters assembled and began marching, though other Clujeni went about their daily business, queuing outside shops. Armed soldiers were everywhere, but they did not hinder the marchers. Emboldened, the protestors began to appeal to the soldiers, invoking their solidarity and their common opposition to the imploding regime. Outside the county headquarters of the Communist Party, where a large crowd of demonstrators had stopped, the soldiers began to waver. “Nu traget¸i, frat¸ilor,” voices rang out, “sîntet¸i de-ai nos¸tri!” (“Don’t shoot, brothers! You’re with us!”). Some offered food and drink to the soldiers; others came forward to embrace them. No longer able to enforce the will of the state, the soldiers yielded to the will of the crowd. When it was reported that Ceaus¸escu had fled by helicoper,7 the news spread instantly, and crowds on the street erupted in cheers and jubila6 This confrontation and the shootings were captured in a series of photographs by Rotta, “21 Decembrie 1989.” 7 Ceaus¸ escu was captured a few hours later, and the National Salvation Front announced its emergence as a caretaker government. Ceaus¸escu and his wife were hastily tried and executed on Christmas Day. On the trial and execution, and more broadly on the debate about the extent to which the events constituted a revolution or a coup d’etat, see Verdery and Kligman, “Romania After Ceaus¸escu”; Calinescu and Tismaneanu, “The 1989 Revolution and Romania’s Future”; and R. Hall, “The Uses of Absurdity,” 501.

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tion, jumping, hugging, dancing, laughing, crying. As a retired teacher recalled, “There was an explosion of joy: strangers hugged and kissed one another. [ . . . ] I cried for joy at the thought that my children would have a better life.” In this extraordinary moment of revolutionary élan, ethnicity was overshadowed by other identifications. This was epitomized when Hungarians spontaneously knelt along with Romanians to sing the patriotic song Des¸teapta˘-te romaˆne!—“Awake, Romanian!”—which begins as follows: Awake, Romanian, from the deadly slumber In which the barbarous tyrants have sunk you. The text had been written by poet Andrei Mures¸anu during the Revolution of 1848, summoning ethnic Romanians of Transylvania to rise up against Habsburg and Hungarian tyranny. Now, however, the song summoned Romanians as citizens, irrespective of ethnicity, to awake from the slumber to which communist tyranny had consigned them. Hungarians joined in enthusiastically, willingly identifying themselves, in this context, as “Romanian.”8

The Re-emergence of Ethnopolitical Contention The joint singing of this patriotic song, which later became Romania’s national anthem, symbolized and crystallized something that was widely felt during the events of December 1989 and their immediate aftermath: a powerful transethnic—or perhaps nonethnic—national solidarity. In this brief period of collective effervescence or communitas, an inclusive, “civic” form of national solidarity was experienced and enacted: the crowds embodied “the people” as a whole, united in opposition to the regime.9 The revolution was experienced and understood in terms of this “vertical” opposition between people and regime; “horizontal” distinctions of ethnicity were eclipsed. The regime had scarcely collapsed, however, when ethnopolitical mobilization began.10 Already on December 23rd, a group of fifteen Hungarian intellectuals met in Cluj and drafted a proclamation in the name 8 Goina, “The Ethnicization of Politics,” 22, reports a similar identification of Hungarians with this song and the Romanian flag during the revolution in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. On the ambiguity of “Romanian” as a category, designating both citizenship and ethnicity, see chapter 7, pp. 213–15. 9 Although the notion of “civic” nationhood is often used uncritically (for a discussion, see Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, chapter 6), it aptly captures the emphasis placed on citizenship—as aspiration, activity, and identity—during the revolutions of 1989 in Romania and elsewhere. On collective effervescence, see Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 245ff. On communitas and its relation to liminality, see Turner, The Ritual Process, 94–130. 10 See Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 22ff.

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of Hungarians of Romania. Published on the front page of the local Hungarian-language newspaper the following day (and in the local Romanian daily a day later), the statement expressed the wish that Hungarians participate “as a collective personality” in the economic, political, and cultural life of Romania and called for “legal and institutional guarantees for the free use of the mother language, and for the reestablishment of a system of education in Hungarian at all levels, including the [independent Hungarian] Bolyai University.”11 On the 24th, a larger group of about fifty Hungarians met and established the Cluj Hungarian Democratic Council (CHDC).12 Similar meetings were held in Timis¸oara, Taˆrgu-Mures¸, and Bucharest. Programmatically, the various local Hungarian initiatives expressed similar concerns. Organizationally, it was the Bucharest initiative, issuing in the establishment of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania (DAHR), that proved decisive.13 The DAHR was envisioned— and quickly grew into—a comprehensive organization with county- and municipal-level branches in all parts of the country (almost exclusively in Transylvania) with significant Hungarian populations. A single comprehensive organization, it was argued, was needed to represent Hungarians’ interests and to act effectively in the wider Romanian political field. As the DAHR consolidated itself, it became the focus of Hungarian ethnopolitical activity, and the initially independent local initiatives like the CHDC lost their significance. The DAHR has functioned as an umbrella organization for Hungarian associations and undertakings in all domains—cultural, caritative, religious, educational, recreational, and economic. At the same time, it has functioned as a political party, winning the support, in parliamentary elections, of virtually the entire Hungarian electorate, and maintaining a consistent representation in parliament.14 The DAHR was a member of the coalition government between 1996 in 2000, and it has continued to provide crucial tacit support for the government since then.15 11 Szabadság, December 24, 1989; the proclamation is reprinted in Bárdi and Éger, Útkeresés és integráció, 45–46. For accounts of the initial mobilization in Cluj, see the materials published on the tenth anniversary by Szabadság, January 11, January 12, and February 2, 2000. 12 The meeting was held in the offices of the Hungarian newspaper Szabadság [“Freedom”], as the pre-existing Hungarian newspaper, Igazság [“Truth”], had been rechristened, and the appeals to mobilize featured prominently in the newspaper. This indicates the importance of a preexisting institutional infrastructure in facilitating rapid Hungarian ethnopolitical mobilization. 13 Bakk, “1989–1999,” 19. 14 The DAHR share of the vote in parliamentary elections has closely mirrored the Hungarian share of the Romanian population; see chapter 12, p. 343n17. 15 For analyses of the DAHR in English, see Shafir, “The Political Party as National Holding Company”; Kántor and Bárdi, “The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR).” For a broader comparative overview of Hungarian ethnopolitical activities in Ukraine, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania in the 1990s, see Bárdi, “Cleavages in Cross-Border Magyar Minority Politics.”

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The DAHR has characterized Hungarians in Romania as an “indigenous community” and an “independent political subject,” entitled to an equal partnership with the Romanian nation as a constituent element of the Romanian state. At the same time, it has characterized Transylvanian Hungarians as an “organic part of the Hungarian nation,” and has claimed the right to cultivate relations with the “mother country” across the border. It has demanded collective rights for Hungarians as a national minority, and territorial autonomy for Hungarian-majority regions. It has demanded the right to public, state-funded education in Hungarian at every level and in every branch of the educational system, including the re-establishment of an autonomous state-funded Hungarian university in Cluj.16 The provisional National Salvation Front (NSF) that took power after the fall of Ceaus¸escu was initially receptive to Hungarian ethnopolitical claims, not least because of the prestige earned by To´´kés and his Hungarian parishioners in Timis¸oara as catalysts of the revolution. Hungarians were included in leading positions in provisional statewide, county, and municipal governing bodies. And in early January, the NSF issued a declaration on the rights of national minorities that criticized the Ceaus¸escu regime’s “chauvinistic policy of forced assimilation,” endorsed constitutional guarantees of minorities’ individual and collective rights, and recognized minorities’ right to freely use their native language, cultivate their national culture, preserve their national identity, and maintain connections with their mother country.17 The honeymoon was short-lived. As it quickly became apparent just how far-reaching Hungarian claims were, and how well-organized, disciplined, and assertive the DAHR was in pursuing them, opposition to those claims began to build, sharpened by electoral competition.18 Latent concerns, resentments, and fears were activated, in part spontaneously, but in large measure through Romanian nationalists’ strenuous efforts to cultivate them. By February 1990, a Romanian nationalist pressure group, Vatra Romaˆneasca˘ (Romanian Hearth), had emerged in several Transylvanian towns as a potent counterforce to the DAHR; it later spawned the radically nationalist Party of Romanian National Unity (PRNU), which enjoyed considerable electoral support in Transylvania 16 These claims are specified among the “fundamental principles” outlined at the beginning of the DAHR program, available at www.rmdsz.ro/script/aboutus.php?lang=hu&menuoption= 0&aboutusID=3. They are also formulated in numerous DAHR documents, a broad selection of which is found in Bárdi and Éger, eds., Útkeresés és integráció. 17 Szabadság, January 7, 1990. 18 Not coincidentally, NSF President Ion Iliescu first spoke out against the dangers of Hungarian “separatism” two days after the NSF had reversed its earlier commitment and announced on January 23 that it would compete in the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for May (Gallagher, Romania After Ceaus¸escu, 81–84; see also idem, Theft of a Nation, 74–92).

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in the 1990s (and which was led for much of the 1990s by Cluj Mayor Gheorghe Funar). Another extreme nationalist party, the Greater Romanian Party (GRP), surged to prominence in 2000, winning 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections; its charismatic presidential candidate, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, did even better, winning 28 percent of the first-round vote. Whether in opposition, or in tacit or active support of the governing coalition (as they were between 1990 and 1996), extreme nationalist parties have played an important role in Romanian politics since the fall of Ceaus¸escu, and the DAHR has served as one of their main targets.19 Mainstream parties, too, have not hesitated to deploy nationalist rhetoric in criticizing DAHR demands, though their readiness to do so has varied with shifting parliamentary alliances and with the international conjuncture. The basic templates that have governed ethnopolitical contention in postcommunist Transylvania were established early on by DAHR claims and Romanian nationalist counterclaims. The DAHR demands an autonomous network of Hungarian institutions, and particularly a separate Hungarian-language school system; Romanian nationalists characterize these aspirations as separatist. The DAHR demands collective as well as individual rights; Romanian nationalists regard this as an unwarranted claim for special privileges above and beyond the equal rights of citizenship. The DAHR demands the right to maintain and cultivate ties to Hungary; for Romanian nationalists, this calls into question their loyalty to the Romanian state. The DAHR demands territorial autonomy for the Hungarian-majority Szekler region; Romanian nationalists regard this as a threat to the constitutionally enshrined unitary and indivisible nature of the Romanian nation-state. Hungarian claims and Romanian counterclaims have played out in a wider field in which the Hungarian state and international organizations have also figured centrally. Unlike communist-era governments, every postcommunist Hungarian government has been committed (though in significantly differing ways) to protecting the interests and promoting the well-being of transborder coethnics. Hungary’s first postcommunist prime minister, József Antall, gave strong symbolic expression to this commitment by declaring that he considered himself prime minister “in 19 For a survey of extreme right parties in postcommunist Romania, see Baleanu, “The Dark Side of Politics in Post-Communist Romania”; G. Andreescu, Extremismul de dreapta în Romaˆnia, chapter 3. On the PRNU, see Gallagher, “Nationalism and Post-Communist Politics”; on the close links between the governing coalition and extreme right parties in the first half of the 1990s, see idem, Theft of a Nation, 119–21. Roma have also been targeted by the extreme right; as Andreescu, Extremismul, 32, notes, they figured more centrally than Hungarians in Vadim Tudor’s unexpectedly successful 2000 presidential campaign. And as Gallagher observes, Vadim was adept at articulating and crystallizing popular discontent on a whole range of issues, most unrelated to ethnicity (Theft of a Nation, 252–56).

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spirit” of fifteen million Hungarians: not only of the ten million citizens of Hungary, but also of Hungarians in neighboring states and elsewhere. Antall also established an Office for Transborder Hungarians to coordinate governmental support for them.20 The symbolic commitment to transborder Hungarians culminated in the so-called “Status Law” of 2001, which established a formal legal status for ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries and attached certain benefits to that status.21 The wider field has also been significantly shaped by ongoing processes of European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to which both Romania and Hungary have been committed. Integration has been conditioned on the institutionalization of minority rights, accommodation of ethnopolitical claims, and negotiated resolutions of ethnonational conflicts. Negotiations concerning admission to the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union (EU) have heightened international scrutiny of domestic politics; this, in turn, has “disciplined” central political elites in both countries. The High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has taken an active role in seeking to craft compromises on key issues, especially in the realm of minority-language education.22 In the remainder of this chapter, we focus selectively on certain key moments, phases, and forms of ethnopolitical contention on the local level.23 We begin with the conflict over the separation of schools along ethnic lines in Cluj and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ceaus¸escu, culminating in Taˆrgu-Mures¸—but not in Cluj—in bloody street fighting in March of 1990. We next consider some of the 20 On the official hands-off stance toward transborder coethnics in communist Hungary and the bottom-up “rediscovery” of Transylvanian Hungarians in the late 1970s and 1980s, see chapter 2, pp. 87–88. For overviews of the policy of the Hungarian state vis-à-vis transborder Hungarians after 1989, see Bárdi, Tény és váló, chapters 5–8; Tóth, “Az elmúlt évtized diaszpórapolitikája”; Mák, “Az új nemzeti politika.” In English see Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 33–36, 51–53; Bárdi, “The History of Relations,” 66–72. For the crucial changes in 1989–90, see Gyo´´ri Szabó, Kisebbségpolitikai Rendszerváltás Magyarországon, 302–74. The web site of the Office of Transborder Hungarians (http://www.htmh.gov.hu/) makes available numerous reports and analyses (including many in English) on the situation of Hungarian minorities in the region. 21 On the “Status Law,” see especially Kántor, ed., A státustörvény; Bárdi, Tény és váló, chapter 6; and, for a wide-ranging collection of essays in English, Kántor et al., eds., The Hungarian Status Law; Stewart, “The Hungarian Status Law.” 22 Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” provides a sustained account of the role played by the High Commissioner in Romania; for an overview of the international dimension of ethnopolitical conflict in Transylvania, see ibid., 36ff. For a broader discussion of minority rights and processes of European integration, see Kymlicka, “Reply and Conclusion,” 369–87; on the important role of the High Commissioner in certifying candidate countries’ compliance with international norms of minority rights, see ibid., 375 and Packer, “Making International Law Matter,” 718–19. 23 For a broader survey of ethnopolitical contention in Transylvania since the change of regime, see the excellent account in Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 21–58.

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provocative nationalizing initiatives undertaken by Cluj mayor Gheorghe Funar after he took office in 1992, involving the marginalization and reframing of Hungarian symbols and the saturation of public space with Romanian symbols and colors. We discuss the controversial proposal to re-establish an autonomous Hungarian university in Cluj. And we examine the conflicts over counting and categorizing that arose in connection with the 2002 census. These do not come close to exhausting the list of contentious issues. Ethnopolitical contention has figured nearly continuously in Cluj public life since the fall of Ceaus¸escu, especially during Funar’s tenure as mayor.24 Sometimes the issues have been purely local; more often—since the DAHR has been headquartered in Cluj, and since Funar has been a leading figure in statewide nationalist parties—local conflicts have been intertwined with regional, statewide, and even inter-state struggles. There have been conflicts over bilingual inscriptions, over street names, over the legitimacy and even legality of the DAHR, and over the celebration of Hungarian holidays, the displaying of the Hungarian flag, and the singing of the Hungarian anthem. Yet while we do not seek to survey the full range of ethnopolitical conflict, the phases and forms of conflict we address are among the most sustained, charged, and ramifying.

The Struggle over Separate Schools in Cluj and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ Minority-language schooling, as we saw in chapter 2, has been central to nationalist contention for more than a century in Transylvania, as it has been elsewhere in East Central Europe. It is therefore not surprising that, after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, ethnopolitical demands were first articulated in the sphere of education. The context for these demands was the substantial erosion of Hungarian-language schooling under Ceaus¸escu, especially at the high school and university levels. All Hungarian high schools, as we noted, had been converted into mixed schools with parallel Hungarian- and Romanian-language sections. And university-level education in Hungarian was available only in a few fields, with a dwindling number of students. Many educated Hungarians saw these developments as an attempt to prevent the reproduction of a Transylvanian Hungarian elite and, in the longer run, to assimilate Transylvanian 24 A book on Funar’s first term alone (1992–96) contains abstracts of 2,464 items that appeared in local newspapers (Balázs and Schwartz, eds., Funar-korszak Kolozsváron). Our own comprehensive collection of materials from local Romanian- and Hungarian-language newspapers, from 1997 through 2004, documents the nearly continuous reference to ethnopolitically contentious issues in the local press.

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Hungarians. This perception lent particular urgency to the politics of education after the change of regime. In Cluj, prominent Hungarians moved quickly to demand the immediate restoration of autonomous Hungarian-language high schools.25 This meant relocating the Romanian-language sections that had been introduced into the city’s historically Hungarian high schools in the 1980s. Although teachers and parents of students in the Romanian sections objected to peremptory eviction in the middle of the school year, the “unmixing” of two high schools was approved by the Ministry of Education, with the support of Cluj county authorities, in late January. The move left many Romanian teachers, students, and parents embittered. Some could not understand the need for separation at all; and even those who agreed that Hungarians should have “their own” schools felt it was unjust and unfairly disruptive to insist on an immediate midyear separation.26 Yet the issue did not spill over into the public arena. There was no attempt to mobilize the wider Romanian public against the proposed move; and the local Romanian newspaper paid scant attention to the affair. In Taˆrgu-Mures¸, however, a two-hour drive to the east, the same issue proved explosive.27 The proposed “unmixing” of high schools engendered a spiral of mobilization and countermobilization, culminating in two days of street fighting that left six dead and hundreds injured. Occurring less than three months after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, with its attendant transethnic euphoria, the violence—the first and, as it turned out, the only instance of serious Romanian-Hungarian violence since the change of regime—came as a shock throughout Transylvania. The Taˆrgu-Mures¸ events gripped the imagination of Clujeni. They affected the course of ethnopolitical mobilization in Cluj, and they have remained a central point of reference—a sobering reminder of the volatility of ethnic mobilization, and a potent symbol of the failure of political leadership.28 We therefore examine here the trajectory of intensifying 25 The re-establishment of a separate Hungarian-language university also figured centrally in early Hungarian ethnopolitical claims, but this was a longer-term goal and a much more complex issue, to which we return below (see pp. 146ff.). 26 See Adeva ˘rul de Cluj, January 13, 1990, for the text of a statement signed by a group of Romanian teachers from one of the high schools. The teachers acknowledged that provisions for minority education were inadequate, but they deplored the hasty “purification” of schools on ethnic grounds. 27 As part of a separate project on the violence in Ta ˆ rgu-Mures¸, oral history interviews were conducted with fifteen Hungarians by Brubaker and Feischmidt and with thirty Romanians by Ca˘lin Goina in 1998 and 1999. Our account draws on these interviews, on the Taˆrgu-Mures¸ local newspapers from late December 1989 through the end of March 1990, and on the parliamentary report produced immediately after the events. For treatments in English, see Goina, “The Ethnicization of Politics” and Stroschein, “Contention and Coexistence.” 28 The monitory meaning of the Ta ˆ rgu-Mures¸ events was reinforced by the large-scale violence that broke out in neighboring Yugoslavia in 1991 following a long sequence of intensifying ethnonational mobilization.

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contention in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, and we seek to explain why ethnopolitical mobilization, initially focused on the same issues, developed in such different directions in the two cities. Located just outside the Szekler region, Taˆrgu-Mures¸ is, after Cluj, the most important center of Hungarian cultural and political activity in Transylvania. At the end of the Ceaus¸escu regime, the town’s population—overwhelmingly Hungarian before World War II and still predominantly Hungarian in the 1960s—was roughly half Hungarian and half Romanian. The initial focus of ethnopolitical contention, as in Cluj, was the request to reconstitute the Bolyai High School—one of the town’s two elite academic high schools—as a Hungarian high school. Tracing its lineage back to a Calvinist Collegium founded in the sixteenth century, Bolyai was an historically Hungarian institution, owned by the Calvinist Church until 1948, when (like all church-run schools) it was nationalized. Since 1961, however, Bolyai had operated with parallel Hungarian and Romanian sections. The proposal—presented by Hungarian teachers to Romanian colleagues when they returned from Christmas vacation in midJanuary—was that the Romanian sections from Bolyai change places immediately with the Hungarian sections from a second elite high school. As in Cluj, the proposal generated an angry response from Romanian teachers and parents. To the Hungarian teachers and parents, on the other hand, legitimate Hungarian “ownership” of Bolyai was deeply taken for granted, even though it had been functioning as a mixed school for nearly three decades.29 Pressured from both sides, authorities vacillated, issuing a series of contradictory rulings; this encouraged further mobilization. Hungarian leaders pressed for an immediate transfer, concerned that the government that was to be elected in May 1990 might renege on any agreement; Romanian leaders rejected the separation altogether as a form of “separatism.” In contrast to Cluj, local Romanian and Hungarian newspapers focused sustained attention on the issue; they did not simply report on the conflict, but intensified it.30 While opposition to the high school unmixings did not spread beyond teachers and parents in Cluj, it engaged a much broader public in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. At the end of January, Hungarian students from Bolyai undertook a sit-in, demanding the immediate conversion of Bolyai into a Hungarianlanguage institution. Romanian students replied with a walkout, chanting (in slogans that rhyme in Romanian) “We are brothers, why separate 29 A liberal Romanian observer captured in an interview the mutual lack of understanding between long-standing colleagues: “The Hungarians seemed deeply affected and almost crushed by the idea that the Romanians didn’t understand them [ . . . ] and on the other hand the Romanians were saying: ‘we suffered together, we did not do any harm to you, why didn’t you discuss this with us’ [i.e., rather than abruptly requesting that we leave in the middle of the year].” 30 On the role of the media in the conflict, see Bodó et al., “Alter/ego ta ˆ rgumures¸ean”; idem, “Alter s¸i ego în minoritate.”

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us?” and “Bolyai is for everyone, even Romanians!” On February 8, thousands crammed the local sports arena for a meeting organized by the Romanian nationalist association Vatra Romaˆneasca˘ (Romanian Hearth). Vatra had been founded by a group of Transylvanian Romanian intellectuals in late December, in response to the establishment of the DAHR, but it initially kept a low profile. In the increasingly polarized climate of Taˆrgu-Mures¸, however, the original leaders, concerned primarily with cultural matters, were displaced by an aggressively nationalist faction. The association’s platform, published in early February, pledged to defend Romania’s territorial integrity and the rights of Transylvanian Romanians. At the mass meeting on February 8, hard-line speeches were met with chants of approval such as “We have a home, Hungarians are renting!” and “Out with the Hungarians!” Hungarians from Taˆrgu-Mures¸ and the surrounding area responded the next day with a previously organized silent procession involving tens of thousands of participants, each carrying a book and a candle. This made a great impression. A liberal Romanian intellectual, sympathetic to Hungarian claims, recalled in an interview that the candlelight march “showed for the first time the existence of a disciplined force that reinforced the feeling of fear in the Romanian community. I told myself: ‘Look how many they are, and how disciplined!’ ” While the school conflict continued to be nourished by the media, other issues were brought into an increasingly volatile mix.31 Events came to a head in mid-March. The conflict over language of instruction spread to the university level, with Hungarian students from the MedicalPharmaceutical Institute staging a strike demanding a Hungarian medical university, and Romanian students organizing a counterprotest. In this tense climate, a provocative 1988 English-language pamphlet by radical nationalist emigré Hungarians in Los Angeles against the “genocide” said to be occurring against Transylvanian Hungarians was reprinted as if it had been a contemporary document as the lead item in Cuvîntul Liber.32 The next day, Hungarians turned out in large numbers to commemorate what has long been, in popular memory, the most resonant and important Hungarian national holiday. The holiday commemorates the popular uprising in Budapest on March 15, 1848, that inaugurated the Revolution of 1848, during which Hungary briefly secured national in31 Hungarian-language textbooks that had been brought in from Hungary were criticized for presenting subversive or anti-Romanian views of Romanian history and geography (“Parliamentary Report,” 22–23). A statue of a Transylvanian Romanian national hero was defaced by Hungarian-language graffiti calling for the statue to be taken down, and the incident was reported in the lead story in Cuvîntul Liber, March 16, 1990, under the headline “A Barbarian Act.” 32 The pamphlet called for people to help stop “deportation, humiliation, and discrimination for 3 million Transylvanian Hungarians,” and featured a map of “historical Hungary” that included Transylvania (labeled as being “under Romanian oppression”); it was presented under the headline “A grave affront to the Romanian people” (Cuvîntul Liber, March 14, 1990; Goina, “The Ethnicization of Politics,” 39).

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dependence and union with Transylvania. For Transylvanian Hungarians, this was an opportunity to celebrate openly in a way that had not been possible under Ceaus¸escu. But in this already polarized context, many Romanians were disconcerted to see Hungarians celebrating in such large numbers a holiday that could be construed as affirming their identification with Hungary. Romanian nationalists emphasized that the “Twelve Points” that were proclaimed in Budapest on March 15, 1848, included the demand for unification of Transylvania with Hungary; they highlighted what they claimed were the irredentist overtones of the celebration of March 15, though the DAHR sought to frame the celebration in civic terms.33 Although March 15th passed without serious incident, a seemingly trivial event the next day—the addition of a Hungarian-language sign to the existing Romanian-language sign in the window of a pharmacy in an outlying neighborhood—provoked an aggressive Romanian protest, growing to perhaps a thousand people, in which pharmacy workers were threatened, and a nearby apartment displaying Hungarian-language banners was vandalized. As the crowd began to march toward the center of town, a car driven by a Hungarian careened into the crowd, injuring a number of protesters. Rumors spread that the pharmacy had declined to serve Romanian clients, and that the Hungarian driver had deliberately ploughed into the crowd, leading to the death of a Romanian adolescent. Neither had any foundation in fact, but both served to further inflame the situation.34 On the morning of March 19, an unruly Romanian crowd gathered in front of the building of the County Council, demanding the resignation of its Hungarian vice president, Elo´´d Kincses. Under pressure from the crowd, some of whom had forced their way into the building, Kincses offered his resignation in the early afternoon. The crowd was joined in the afternoon by Romanians bussed in from neighboring villages, who had been informed that Romanians were in danger and, on some accounts, generously supplied with alcohol.35 The crowd made its way in midafternoon to the DAHR offices, outside of which a few hundred Hungar33 For the complex and delicate issues involved in Hungarian commemorations of March 15, see Brubaker and Feischmidt, “1848 in 1998.” For the Romanian nationalist point of view on the commemorations, see for example Judea, Taˆrgu-Mures¸, 72–74. 34 The charge that “irresponsible, extremist Hungarian elements, using an automobile as a weapon, drove into the crowd in a premeditated fashion, injuring a number of demonstrators, including children,” was broadcast in a radio appeal by a Vatra spokesperson the next day, and published on the front page of Cuvîntul Liber on March 20 (“Parliamentary Report,” annex 24). In fact, as subsequent judicial proceedings revealed, the driver was inebriated; he was married to a Romanian; and he was accompanied in the car by a Romanian colleague (“Parliamentary Report,” 27). 35 Some villagers reported having received anonymous phone calls warning them that their children—many of whom were studying at high schools in Taˆrgu-Mures¸—were in danger from Hungarians. They reported that they had been summoned by ringing church bells and advised by the mayor and local police chief to travel to Taˆrgu-Mures¸ to protect their children (Goina, “The Ethnicization of Politics,” 39).

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ians had been protesting the ouster of Kincses. Most of the Hungarians had dispersed before the Romanians arrived; the seventy or so who remained sought refuge from the menacing crowd by entering the building. The crowd forced its way into the building and destroyed the DAHR offices; the Hungarians barricaded themselves in the attic and called for help. A few police and militia units arrived, but they were unable or unwilling to disperse the crowd. After a tense standoff of several hours—during which the police urged the Hungarians to come out for their own safety lest the crowd get wholly out of control, while the Hungarians refused to do so without more substantial police protection— a group of Hungarians finally left the building, only to be beaten by demonstrators who broke through the thin police cordon. One of the Hungarian leaders, playwright András Süto´´, lost the sight of one eye, and several others were hospitalized.36 The following morning, Hungarian leaders announced a general strike in response to the violence. A large crowd of ten thousand or so Hungarians assembled in the main square, outside the county council building, demanding the reinstatement of Kincses and the punishment of those responsible for the previous night’s violence. The council, meeting inside, announced that Kincses would be reinstated. In the early afternoon, a Romanian crowd began to assemble on the other side of the square. For several hours, the situation was tense, but peaceful. As on the previous day, buses and trucks again arrived carrying Romanians from nearby villages. Shortly thereafter, scuffles began. Now, however, many young Hungarian men were prepared for a fight, and indeed saw themselves as getting even for the previous night’s attack.37 And it was not only Romanians who came into town; so did Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Roma from neighboring villages. By nightfall, fierce street fighting had broken out between groups of young men who remained on the streets; participants armed themselves with sticks, knives, iron bars, molotov cocktails, and whatever else was ready at hand. Six people were killed, and about three hundred injured, about two-thirds of them Romanians. At this point, the army finally intervened, preventing further escalation. Disputes raged in the press and in Parliament over responsibility for the violence, but leaders called a halt to demonstrations, and the cycle of mobilization and countermobilization was interrupted.38 36 Süto ´´’s account is quoted at length in Simon, Városkép románnokkal és magyarokkal, 98–116. See also Kincses, Black Spring, 82–93; the report of Helsinki Watch (“Parliamentary Report,” annex 27–3); Judea, Taˆrgu-Mures¸, 93–105. 37 In our interviews with Hungarian participants, several expressed pride that Hungarians had “won” the fight that evening. 38 More than ten years later, an agreement was finally reached according to which Romanian language instruction would be gradually phased out at Bolyai High School; the last Romanian class graduated in 2005.

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In Cluj, mobilization had been intensifying in the days before the violence in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. Vatra Romaˆneasca˘ had organized a meeting in mid-February protesting the school separation, and its broader criticisms of Hungarian “separatism” were published in several lengthy supplements printed as part of the local Romanian newspaper.39 On March 12, Hungarian students at the Babes¸-Bolyai University went on strike in support of the striking Hungarian students in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. Romanian students staged a counterdemonstration March 17. When violence broke out in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, however, Hungarian and Romanian student leaders met and agreed to try to end the demonstrations.40 Independently, Hungarian and Romanian university professors and public intellectuals organized a meeting in which they emphasized the common interests of Hungarians and Romanians and urged students and other Clujeni to avoid being manipulated and set against one another. And while the local newspapers published some partisan and tendentious accounts of the violence, they also published more nuanced accounts, as well as appeals for calm. Hungarian students were persuaded to end their strike, and while some Romanian students demonstrated in solidarity with Romanians of Taˆrgu-Mures¸ on March 21 and 22, street mobilization thereafter petered out. Why, in the turbulent aftermath of the fall of Ceaus¸ escu, did ethnopolitical conflict escalate into violent confrontation in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ but not in Cluj (or elsewhere in Transylvania)?41 The primary focus of ethnopolitical contention, after all, concerned the separation of mixed high schools along ethnic lines. And in this respect, Romanians had more reason to be aggrieved in Cluj than in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. Romanian teachers, parents, and students were presented with what amounted to a fait accompli in Cluj; they were obliged to vacate two schools on short notice in the middle of the school year. No such immediate unmixing took place in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, yet Romanian opposition to the proposed unmixing was more vehement than in Cluj, even after authorities made it clear that Romanian-language sections in Bolyai would not have to move until the end of the academic year. The school conflict in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ was linked to other contentious issues in a manner that had no parallel in Cluj. The brusquely announced and insensitively implemented school separation in Cluj caused great Adeva˘rul de Cluj, March 1, March 8, and March 16, 1990. 2003 interview with one of the leaders of the Hungarian students in Cluj in March 1990. 41 We do not address here the specific question of the failure of authorities to prevent violence once it was imminent, nor do we address the question of the extent to which nationalist organizations, and notably Vatra Romaˆneasca, were involved in mobilizing and organizing the participation of outside villagers in the violence in town. We are interested less in the actual outbreak of violence than in the conditions that made for a spiral of intensifying mobilization and countermobilization in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ but not in Cluj. 39 40

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indignation among the affected Romanian teachers, parents, and students, but it was not perceived as threatening Romanian interests beyond those of the persons directly involved. In Taˆrgu-Mures¸, however, Romanian nationalists framed school separation as just one aspect of a wider problem of Hungarian “separatism.” Hungarian demands for “their own” institutions, and for an unspecified form of autonomy, already suggested a program going well beyond a few high schools; Romanian nationalists claimed Hungarians were seeking radical institutional separation (the prospect of separate medical facilities was a favorite example), territorial autonomy for the neighboring Hungarian-majority Szekler region, and even secession from Romania and unification with Hungary. Why was it possible to represent Hungarian demands in a more sinister light in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ than in Cluj? A first part of the answer is to be found in ethnic demography. In both towns, urban growth and economic development—and in the 1960s and 1970s, state-led heavy industrialization—entailed substantial ethnodemographic change, as migrants from the countryside, most of them Romanian, moved to the Hungarian-dominated towns in large numbers. In both towns, Hungarians gradually lost their leading positions in local institutions. But ethnodemographic and attendant social structural change began earlier and proceeded much further in Cluj. During the interwar period, Romanians established a substantial presence in Cluj, and after World War II, the Romanian share of the population continued to grow, from about half in 1956 to about three-quarters by the end of the 1980s. In TaˆrguMures¸ , by contrast, Romanians had comprised less than a quarter of the population in 1956; their share had grown to roughly half by the late 1980s.42 The conjuncture of partial democratization, uncertainty in the wake of regime change, sudden ethnopolitical mobilization, and approximate ethnodemographic parity in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ induced an ethnicized struggle for control of the city.43 For many Hungarians, Taˆrgu-Mures¸ was “the last bastion of Hungariandom:” it was the last large Transylvanian town in which Hungarians still comprised, if not a clear majority, at least approximately half of the population.44 Here, Romanianization was not a fait accompli. Romanian control in Cluj and elsewhere was incontestable; but local power in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ was up for grabs. The struggle 42 Since the last census had been held in 1977, there was uncertainty in 1990 about whether Hungarians remained in the majority. The 1992 census recorded 52 percent Hungarians, 47 percent Romanians; by 2002, the proportions were reversed. 43 On the potentially destabilizing effect of sudden and partial democratization, and the emergence of a partially free press, see Snyder, From Voting to Violence. Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 85, find instability in governing arrangements to be linked to the onset of civil war. 44 The majority-Hungarian towns in the Szekler region were all considerably smaller.

1a

Plate 1. Hungarian Consulate on Union Square. Mayor Funar objected strenuously to the reopening of the Consulate in 1997 (it had been closed by Ceaus¸escu in the late 1980s). When a group of men placed an extendable ladder against the side of the building and removed the Hungarian flag two days after the Consulate reopened, Funar praised this as a patriotic deed. The men were arrested, and the flag restored to its place; but for the duration of Funar’s tenure in office, it was flanked by Romanian flags (above). After Funar was voted out of office in 2004, the Romanian flags were removed; an EU flag now flies next to the Hungarian one (left). On the theft of the flag, see the introduction, pp. 1–4.

1b

2a

2c

2b

2d

2e

2f

Plate 2. Union Square with tricolor flagpoles, pennants, and benches. The Roman Catholic St. Michael’s Church (plates 2a, 2c, 2d) and the adjacent early twentieth century equestrian statue of the Renaissance-era king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus (plates 2b, 2c, 2e), are the most resonant symbols of Cluj’s Hungarian past. By reframing these Hungarian icons in Romanian colors, Mayor Funar sought to redefine the symbolic center of the city as a Romanian public space. See chapter 4, pp. 138–41.

3a

3b

3c

3d

3e

3f

Plate 3. Tricolor Cluj.

3g

3h

3i

3j

3k

3l

4a

Plate 4. Hungarian procession commemorating the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary. Small tricolor Hungarian lapel ribbons are worn by some (generally older) participants (above); the large Hungarian flag in plate 4b is carried by a man in a traditional Szekler costume, a form of dress with a strong national connotation. The annual March 15th procession leads from St. Michael’s Church (where an ecumenical service is held) to the former Biasini Hotel (where a wreath is placed below a late-nineteenth-century Hungarian commemorative plaque). See map 1, p. 2. Mayor Funar did not succeed in several attempts to ban the procession; but he did flank wreath and plaque, visible next to the top of the ladder in plate 4c, with Romanian flags, and he placed a competing Romanian- and English-language plaque on the same building (see plate 15b).

4b

4c

5a

Plate 5a. Tricolor sign with excerpts from Romanian constitution. In 2001, Mayor Funar erected this sign in the center of town, underscoring the status of Romanian as the official language of the country and “the equality of all citizens under the law, without privileges or discrimination.” This was done to highlight and justify his refusal to implement the Law on Public Administration, mandating the use of Hungarian in administrative proceedings and on official signs. The mayor claimed that these provisions were unconstitutional and were a form of discrimination against Romanians. See chapter 4, pp. 152–53.

5b

Plate 5b. Tricolor sign describing excavations in Union Square. See also plates 2c, 14b.

5c

Plates 5c, d. The sign above welcomes visitors to Cluj in eight languages, including Chinese, but not in Hungarian. In Cluj and some other Transylvanian towns with substantial Hungarian populations, resistance to introducing bilingual signs (as required by the Law on Public Administration) sometimes prompted local Hungarians to take matters into their own hands (left).

5d

6a

Plate 6a. Gravestone with ribbon in Hungarian national colors. The Central Cemetery in Cluj is a large, wooded expanse that ascends a hillside just south of the town center. Founded in the late sixteenth century as a supraconfessional town cemetery, the Central Cemetery has a special symbolic significance, and comprises a major site of historical memory, for Hungarians. Since most of those buried there until recent decades were Hungarian, the cemetery preserves in its monuments and inscriptions the traces of the earlier, predominantly Hungarian town. The cemetery is the scene not only of private and familial acts of remembrance (for Romanians as well as Hungarians), but also of more or less organized, semipublic commemorations. On the evening of November 1st, All Souls’ Day or the Day of the Dead, Clujeni visit the cemetery to pay their respects to dead relatives by lighting candles; in addition, groups of Hungarian students, some led by their teachers, visit the graves of famous Hungarians and light candles in their memory. The cemetery is also visited during the summer months by tourist groups from Hungary; they sometimes leave ribbons or wreaths in national colors on the graves, such as this one on the grave of an early twentieth-century theater director and his wife, an actress.

6b

Plate 6b. During the Funar years, one would occasionally see the Hungarian national colors used in floral decorations, as on these cars parked outside St. Michael’s Church for a wedding. This served as a small but visible gesture of response, at once private and public, to Mayor Funar’s saturation of public space with Romanian national colors.

Plate 7. “We count! Census March 18–27, 2002.” This is part of a flyer distributed by the DAHR in advance of the census carried out in March 2002. Printed in the Hungarian national colors, the flyer was part of a concerted effort by Hungarian newspapers, churches, and the DAHR to mobilize Hungarians for the census—and to make sure they were counted as Hungarians. The flyer reproduces two key questions from the census form, about ethnicity and native language, and spells out, in Romanian, the proper answer (“Maghiara˘”), along with the corresponding numerical code. The rest of the flyer, not reproduced here, included detailed instructions for filling out the census forms; it assured readers that census information would be used for statistical purposes only, and that nobody could suffer any disadvantage for identifying as Hungarian. This informational and mobilizational campaign reflected Hungarian political leaders’ concerns about the neutrality of the census (see chapter 4, pp. 151–59).

Plate 8. “Romanian” and “Hungarian” city map covers. In the early 1990s, it was difficult to find comprehensive street maps of Cluj. These maps, prepared in 1996 by a Hungarian cartographic firm in Budapest, were the first widely available city maps. They were published in Romanian and Hungarian variants, the latter immediately recognizable as such by its use of the Hungarian national colors (the colors on the Romanian version evoke but do not match the Romanian national colors: red, white, and blue, rather than red, yellow, and blue). The photograph on the Hungarian map—showing the Matthias Corvinus statue against the background of St. Michael’s Church—is an unambiguously Hungarian symbol. The photograph on the Romanian map—showing the National Theater—is more ambiguous: the theater was built in 1906 as the Hungarian Nemzeti Színház (National Theater), and became the Romanian Teatrul Nat¸ional in 1919. The Hungarian map includes on the back an exhaustive listing of historical Hungarian street names as well as other historical information of interest in the first instance to tourists from Hungary. Both maps provide the same comprehensive list of sites, monuments, and public buildings; the Hungarian version, however, includes an additional section identifying the graves of illustrious Hungarians in the Central Cemetery (plate 6a), keyed to numbers on the main map (the same numbers are visible on the Romanian map, but there is no corresponding key to them).

9a

9b

9c

Plates 9a, b, c. In and around the central market.

9d

Plate 9d. Section of the central market offering inexpensive (and often poor-quality) clothes, shoes, and electronics.

9e

Plate 9e. Watermelons trucked in from Oltenia, in southwestern Romania, at a market in an outlying apartment-block district.

Plate 10. Scene from celebration of Romanian national holiday on December 1, which commemorates the proclamation of the union of Transylvania with Romania in 1918.

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for political and administrative power and for control of municipal institutions quickly became organized along ethnic lines. Ethnic polarization was facilitated by a social split between the Hungarian and Romanian leaders that emerged from the revolution: the former were dominated by intellectuals, the latter by former military officers.45 In Cluj, by contrast, both the Romanian and Hungarian leaders that emerged from the revolution belonged to the old urban intelligentsia, whose Romanian representatives accepted the legitimacy of separate Hungarian schools, however much they may have been offended by the abrupt manner in which the separation was implemented. Local struggles in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, moreover, had an important regional dimension that was absent in Cluj. Situated just to the west of the predominantly Hungarian Szekler region, Taˆrgu-Mures¸ was more exposed than Cluj to the newfound ethnopolitical assertiveness of the region’s Hungarians. The December upheaval had enabled Hungarians to consolidate their hold on local institutions in the small Szekler towns, and numerous Romanians left the region in the following weeks. Some policemen and Securitate officials—almost all of them Romanian—had been chased out of town (and in a few instances killed) during the revolutionary turbulence itself. These had initially been seen as instances of revolutionary violence against old regime officials and had not received much scrutiny at the time. As ethnic mobilization intensified in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, these incidents were reinterpreted through an ethnic prism; they were now construed as ethnic violence by Hungarians against Romanians.46 Proximity to the Szekler region, finally, made the specter of a “stateness” problem easier for Romanian nationalists to invoke and exploit in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ than in Cluj. Compared with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, Romania after Ceaus¸escu did not have a serious “stateness” problem: there were no major disagreements about the boundaries of the state and its citizenry.47 Both the DAHR and the Hungarian government made it clear that they did not seek changes 45 Hungarian leaders included the dissident Károly Király, the lawyer Elo ´´d Kincses, who had represented To´´kés in his struggle against the eviction order from Timis¸oara, and the writer András Süto´´; Romanian leaders included Colonel Ioan Judea, Reserve General Ioan Scrieciu, and Major Vasile T¸îra. 46 Goina, “The Ethnicization of Politics,” 34–35; see also Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 137–40. 47 On the “stateness” problem and its importance in theorizing transitions to democracy, see Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, esp. chapters 2 and 19. In certain respects the “stateness” question loomed larger after the Taˆrgu-Mures¸ events, as Yugoslavia careened toward disintegration and civil war following the victory of nationalists in May 1990 elections in Slovenia and Croatia, and as the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 made it possible to imagine the unification of Moldova with Romania. (Most of the territory of Moldova had belonged to Romania during the interwar period, and the majority of its population was Romanian-speaking; see King, The Moldovans.)

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in state frontiers. Yet Romanian nationalists could exploit the discourse of radical nationalist fringe elements—as well as the ambiguity of certain statements by political leaders in Hungary and by some Transylvanian Hungarians—to cultivate a fear of revisionism. In the turbulence and uncertainty of the time, some people no doubt took the revisionist threat seriously. And “stateness” issues in a larger sense were very much present. The DAHR did contest the nature of the Romanian state, if not its territorial frontiers; it expressly rejected the model of a unitary nationstate. For nationally minded Romanians, demands for autonomy raised concerns—more vivid in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ than in Cluj—about a possible Hungarian-dominated state-within-a-state in the Szekler region,48 or even about a special status for Transylvania as a whole that would detach the region from the control of the government in Bucharest and bring it under the influence of Hungary.

Gheorghe Funar and the Nationalization of Public Space Nationalist contention in Cluj entered a new phase in February 1992, when Gheorghe Funar, the candidate of the ultranationalist Party of Romanian National Unity (PRNU), was elected mayor. Like the radical nationalist pressure group Vatra Romaˆneasca˘, the PRNU was organized almost exclusively in Transylvania; its central theme—again like that of Vatra—was the threat posed by Hungarian ethnonational claims to Transylvanian Romanians and, more broadly, to the national unity and territorial integrity of the Romanian state.49 For the next twelve years, Funar dominated the local political scene with his flamboyant rhetoric, contentious style, and outspokenly antiHungarian animus. Funar’s success in Transylvania’s most important city, moreover, brought him national prominence; he ran as PRNU presidential candidate in the statewide election of September 1992, winning nearly 20 percent of the first-round vote in Transylvania, and became chairman of the party in October. Funar was ousted from the PRNU chairmanship in 1997, but he has served since 1998 as general secretary of the GRP, Romania’s other major extreme nationalist party. Funar’s rhetoric was relentlessly and often aggressively anti-Hungarian. He described Hungarians as the descendants of a barbarian people, for whom a thousand years in the region had been insufficient to become 48 When Ta ˆrgu-Mures¸ was still predominantly Hungarian, it had been the capital of the Hungarian Autonomous Region that existed between 1952 and 1968 (see chapter 2, pp. 82, 83). 49 See pp. 124–25.

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civilized.50 He called for the organization of an “exchange of population” between Hungary and Romania, and proposed that the Hungarian state establish a “Ministry of Absorption” to “facilitate the return of ethnic Hungarians,” whom he characterized as a “hotbed of instability and hate” during their “centuries-long diaspora.”51 Funar sought to bar the DAHR from holding its congress in Cluj, asked the government to outlaw the DAHR (or to hold a referendum on the subject), and called for suspending the parliamentary immunity of DAHR deputies.52 He sought to ban the public celebration of the March 15 Hungarian national holiday, and he called for the punishment of persons displaying the Hungarian flag or singing the Hungarian anthem.53 Perhaps most unsettlingly, Funar accused Hungary, and DAHR leaders, of harboring irredentist designs on Transylvania; called the DAHR a Budapest-directed “terrorist organization”; and claimed Transylvanian Hungarians were secretly collecting weapons, forming paramilitary detachments, and planning an attack on Romanians.54 Funar’s intemperate rhetoric far outstripped his actions. As mayor, he lacked the authority to enact most of the measures he proposed.55 Significantly, he did not control the police. The mayor’s office does control various permits and licenses, but this seems to have been more important as a source of graft and as a means of steering lucrative business opportunities toward political insiders than as a means of systematic ethnic discrimination; though complaints about discrimination were regularly reported in the Hungarian press, Romanians who were not part of Funar’s circle also complained of discrimination.56 Crucially, Funar’s rhetorical provocations were not accompanied by a campaign of physi50 Balázs and Schwartz, Funar-korszak Kolozsváron, 22, 262. This volume provides comprehensive (and well-indexed) documentation of Funar’s first term as reflected in the local Romanian- and Hungarian-language press; we give only a sampling here. 51 Ibid., 259; Shafir, “The Political Party as National Holding Company,” 114. 52 Balázs and Schwartz, Funar-korszak Kolozsváron, 259, 262, 279, 281. 53 Ibid., 88, 262, 267–71. On the March 15 celebration, see plate 4. 54 Ibid., 81, 260, 262, 264, 267; RFE/RL Newsline, February 21, 1995, and February 19, 2001. Even toward the end of his tenure, Funar was still claiming (in an interview with a British newspaper) that the Hungarian secret service was training young men as paramilitaries and importing guns and explosives and that a “Yugoslav-style civil war” could break out at any time (Daily Telegraph, March 17, 2004). 55 This was all the more true during Funar’s third term, when his supporters comprised only a small minority on the city council. 56 According to one survey, although half of Hungarians in Cluj claimed to have experienced ethnic discrimination at least once, only 13 percent claimed to have experienced such discrimination frequently, and only 6 percent claimed to have experienced discriminatory treatment from local public authorities. See Salat and Veres, “Ethnic Minorities and Local Public Administration,” which examines the structure and practice of local public administration in postcommunist Romania, with special reference to Cluj and Sfîntu Gheorghe (a Hungarian-majority town in the Szekler region).

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cal intimidation against Hungarians or the DAHR. Throughout his three terms as mayor, the DAHR continued to function unhindered; it even held its 1995 congress in Cluj without incident, although Funar had fulminated about preventing it from doing so. And though there were a few tense moments during Funar’s first term, most Hungarians did not feel insecure or afraid during his tenure, especially after his first few years in office. This is not to suggest that Hungarians were not disturbed or even outraged by the mayor’s pronouncements; many were. But the prevailing absence of fear marked a crucial difference between the atmosphere in Cluj under Funar and the atmosphere in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ in early 1990. Yet in one domain, the mayor’s words were accompanied by deeds. Funar used every means at his disposal—especially plaques, monuments, and national colors—to nationalize public space.57 In this way, he complemented his aggressive verbal rhetoric with an equally aggressive visual rhetoric. Most controversially, Funar sought to neutralize the Hungarian symbolism of the town’s main square, dominated by the imposing late Gothic St. Michael’s Church and the adjacent monumental equestrian statue of Matthias Corvinus.58 For many Hungarians, church and statue jointly comprise the town’s central lieu de mémoire and are deeply invested with ethnonational significance.59 As the town’s main Catholic church, and most famous architectural monument, St. Michael’s symbolizes not only Cluj’s Hungarian past, but its Hungarian present as well. Although twice as many Hungarians in Cluj are Calvinist than Catholic, the size, centrality, and symbolic significance of St. Michael’s have made it a key site for ecumenical Hungarian services, public gatherings, and celebrations of national holidays. The statue of King Matthias has an even more explicitly national meaning. As we observed in the preceding chapter, it was erected as a monument to triumphant Hungarian nationalism; and most Hungarians understand Matthias to have been “their” great king. The image of the statue, with the church in the background, adorns the cover of numerous Hungarian guide books and pamphlets; for the many Hungarian tourists who visit Cluj, it is the single most indispensable image that they themselves feel obliged to photograph.60 But church and statue are not only national symbols; they are also See Laza˘r, “Cluj 2003”; Tamarkin, “Space Wars.” See map 1 and plates 11a and 12b. 59 On sites of memory generally, see the momumental collection edited by Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, a partial English translation of which is included in Nora, ed., Realms of Memory. On statues as sites of memory, and of struggles over memory, in Eastern Europe, see for example King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe”; Grant, “New Moscow Monuments”; Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; György and Turai, eds., Art and Society in the Age of Stalin. 60 See plate 16a. 57 58

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civic symbols, local icons with which many Clujeni, Romanian as well as Hungarian, strongly identify. And, for many long-standing residents, Romanian and Hungarian, church, statue, and square are symbols of the “old” Cluj, the smaller, more intimate, more urbane and civilized town that they recall as having existed before the great influx from the countryside that accompanied the development of heavy industry under Ceaus¸escu.61 The plaza in front of the statue is popular with Clujeni of all ages. It is in the shape of a wide crescent, with benches lining both rims, one set curving around the base of the statue, looking out, the other facing the statue from across the plaza. The space thus enclosed forms an intimate urban stage, a collective living-room, a choice setting for observing the students, missionaries, churchgoers, pensioners, tourists, lovers, wedding parties, and young children with parents or grandparents who congregate there. For most of those who frequent the square, the ethnonational associations are muted or irrelevant; the square represents a convenient meeting point, or an oasis of tranquility in a crowded city center. Still, for some Clujeni, Hungarians in particular, the square does have powerfully resonant ethnonational associations. In the mid-1990s, Brubaker and Fox spent a long afternoon at the home of a Hungarian taxi driver and his Romanian wife. The couple had ended up quarreling about a whole series of “national” issues, and the driver had not done terribly well holding up his end of the argument against his more dynamic and articulate wife. Driving us back to the main square, he pulled over, turned off the engine, and gestured toward the largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings surrounding the square. “These are all Hungarian buildings,” he said, as if in answer to his wife’s arguments; “show me one Romanian building.” The town, he said, had been Hungarian for a thousand years, Romanian for only seventy-five. Although such views are rarely formulated so explicitly, many Hungarians have some inchoate sense of the square as “their own.” But it is not only Hungarians who think of the square in this way. Some Romanian nationalists think of it in the same way, and find this galling. It was just this representation of the square as somehow “Hungarian” that prompted a series of measures on Funar’s part that sought to nationalize the square, and to reclaim the symbolic center of the city as a “Romanian” public space. Funar wanted to make sure that visitors “would realize that Cluj-Napoca was, is, and always will be a Romanian town.”62 61 62

See chapter 3, pp. 114ff. Interview with Funar in Adeva˘rul de Cluj, December 8, 1992.

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One strategy of symbolic nationalization involved renaming.63 After World War II, the square had been given a good internationalist name: Freedom Square. Shortly after the revolution, the name from the interwar period had been restored: Union Square, commemorating the unification of Transylvania with Romania in 1918. This name was expressly nationalist; but it was not nationalist enough for the mayor, who proposed to rename the square again, to Daco-Roman Square.64 This was a gesture toward the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, according to which present-day Romanians are heirs not only to Roman civilization and culture, but also to the civilization and culture of the indigenous Dacians, conquered by the Romans in the second century and (according to nationalist historiography) fusing with their conquerors into a new people, the ancestors of today’s Romanians. As a nationalizing strategy, renaming has its limits. Official names can be altered; but vernacular naming practices are more refractory to change. Already under Ceaus¸escu, as we noted in the previous chapter, the official name of the town was changed to Cluj-Napoca; but that name is almost never used in ordinary conversation (Romanians refer simply to Cluj, Hungarians to Kolozsvár). Similarly, almost nobody calls the main square by its official name, Union Square; Romanians refer to the square (and to the statue) as Matei Corvin (the Romanian name for Matthias Corvinus), Hungarians simply as the fo ´´ter (main square). A second strategy involved reinterpreting the past, righting historical wrongs by rewriting history, literally reinscribing it on memorial plaques and tablets. Most controversial was Funar’s move to restore the nationalist inscription that had adorned the statue of King Matthias between 1932 and 1940.65 The old/new plaque was unveiled on Romania’s new national holiday, December 1, 1992, commemorating the mass assembly at Alba Iulia in 1918 that had endorsed the union of Transylvania with Romania.66 The inscription was a dual affront to Hungarian national sensibilities, claiming Matthias Corvinus as a Romanian, and countering the triumphalist image projected by the statue by referring to the king as having been defeated by Moldavia. The decision to restore the inscrip63 For a more general discussion of symbolic strategies for representing the presocialist past in postsocialist Eastern Europe, distinguishing between strategies of recovery, reconstruction, and nationalization, see Niedermüller, “Zeit, Geschichte, Vergangenheit”; and for a general discussion of modes of symbolic “occupation” of public space, see Stachel, “Politische Einschreibungen in den öffentlichen Raum.” 64 Permission for this name change was denied by the county council (Balázs and Schwartz, Funar-korszak Kolozsváron, 334, 367). 65 See chapter 3, pp. 100, 108. 66 For an historical account of the changing significance of December 1 in Romanian commemorative practice, see Bucur, “Birth of a Nation.” Bucur emphasizes the gap between official commemorative practice and discourse and broader public understandings, in which December 1 does not appear to have a central place.

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tion provoked a substantial Hungarian protest, to which we return below.67 On the whole, however, reinterpretation, like renaming, is a relatively unobtrusive strategy; once in place, plaques are easily ignored. A third and more obtrusive strategy involved the attempt to rediscover—by physically uncovering—the long-buried past. In 1994, excavations were begun in the main square, in an effort to demonstrate its prior Roman—and by extension, Romanian—character. Little serious archaeological work was done, and according to Romanian specialists, the findings were modest; but the pits remained for the duration of Funar’s tenure in office. In a related move, Funar proposed erecting in the main square a copy of the monumental, forty-meter high Trajan’s Column in Rome, which commemorates in a spiral of carved relief the Emperor’s conquest of Dacia—present-day Romania—in the second century c.e.68 The fourth—and in the town as a whole, the most conspicuous— nationalizing strategy involved redecorating. In the main square, the statue and plaza were reframed through the liberal use of the national colors. First came a towering set of six flagpoles, flanking the plaza. Next, red, yellow, and blue pennants were strung between church and statue, in a manner reminiscent of an American used car lot; this ensured that from almost any angle, views of the statue would include the Romanian national colors. A few years later, the plaza’s somewhat decrepit white benches were replaced with new benches, brightly painted in the Romanian national colors; the previously white flagpoles and their pedestals were also repainted.69 When the Hungarian Consulate opened on the main square, and Funar proved unable to prevent the Hungarian flag from flying there, he was at least able to surround it with Romanian flags.70 The redecorating was not confined to the main square.71 Funar placed flags in great profusion throughout the town. Most of them—some three thousand in all—were installed for the December 1 national holiday in 1999; and they remained in place after the holiday.72 Benches, sidewalk posts, playground equipment, a few trams, and finally—in a supreme instance of nationalist kitsch—sidewalk trash bins were repainted in the Romanian national colors.73 (This last was too much even for ardent nationalists, offending not simply their aesthetic but precisely their nationFor other instances of Funar’s attempts to re-present and reframe history, see plate 15. See map 1, p. 2 and plates 2c and 14b–c. 69 See plate 2. 70 See plate 1a and pp. 1–4. 71 For tricolor Cluj, see plate 3. 72 Szabadság, November 30, 1999; Adeva ˘rul de Cluj, November 30, 1999. 73 Some private businesses joined what one report called the “tricolor parade” as well: see the Transindex photo report, September 10, 2002 (http://fotoriport.transindex.ro/?cikk=1064). The nationalist kitsch has even provided inspiration for artists; see the description of the exhibit 67 68

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alist sensibilities; it was criticized by fellow ultranationalists in the town council as an offense against national symbols.)74 In addition to seeking to nationalize the old “Hungarian” main square, Funar carried further the interwar project of establishing an unambiguously “Romanian” square as a competing focus. As we observed in the preceding chapter, a monumental Orthodox cathedral had been completed in 1933 in a square on the edge of downtown, five hundred meters to the east of the main square. This served as a symbolic counterweight to St. Michael’s Church; but Funar wanted a counterweight to the statue of King Matthias as well. After World War II, an obelisk commemorating Soviet heroes had been erected in front of the cathedral, and a bronze miniature tank commemorating Ukrainian forces had been placed on the other side. Needless to say, these did not answer to the nationalizing task, and they were removed in 1990. A towering statue was erected in 1993, commemorating nationalist icon Avram Iancu, a young lawyer turned guerilla warrior who successfully held out against Hungarian forces in the mountains southwest of Cluj during the fighting that followed the Revolution of 1848. The statue, representing Avram Iancu atop a tall column, sword extended, was dedicated on December 1, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Alba Iulia assembly.75 In the ethnosymbolic geography of the town, the two squares were now antagonistic mirror images of one another.76 Two of Funar’s nationalizing initiatives in the main square—the plaque on the statue of Matthias, and the excavations—provoked substantial Hungarian mobilization.77 The protests against the emplacement of the plaque—characterized by Szabadság as an “attack” on the statue and “an offense against Romanian Hungariandom or the entire Hungarian nation”78—were initiated by students. As workers were installing the

“The Very Best of Red, Yellow and Blue” in Mircan, “History Defeated: The Art of Duo van der Mixt,” and a report with a sampling of photos in Transindex (http://fotoriport.transindex .ro/?cikk=2473). See also the cover of the journal IDEA arta˘ + societate, no. 15, 2003, an image of a young man with a watering can carefully sprinkling one of the tricolor street-side posts (http://www.idea.ro/revista/index.php?nv=1&go=2&mg=27). 74 Monitorul de Cluj, June 7, 2002. 75 See plate 13. A monument to Avram Iancu in front of the cathedral had already been proposed during the interwar period; see Buzea, Clujul, 1919–1939, 82. 76 See map 1, p. 2. A year later, another nationalist monument was erected just off the main square, commemorating the leaders of the Memorandum movement (see plate 16d). 77 Our account of protests in the next few paragraphs is based on numerous articles in the local Romanian- and Hungarian-language press from late November and early December 1992 and from June and July 1994 (only a few of which we cite here); on the press clippings abstracted in Balázs and Schwartz, Funar-korszak Kolozsváron; on Feischmidt’s observations of the protest described in this paragraph; and on our interviews. Fesichmidt gives an account in Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 46ff.; for an account in English, see Stroschein, “Contention and Coexistence,” which provides a detailed chronology. 78 Szabadság, November 30, 1992; December 1, 1992.

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plaque, the students, many from the nearby Calvinist theological seminary, tried to form a human chain to block access to the statue, but police pushed them aside, and work continued. In the early evening, the students lit candles and sang hymns against the reverberations of the workmen’s hammers.79 The singing attracted the attention of passersby, Romanian and Hungarian, and gradually the mixed crowd began to form two groups, with Romanians countering the Hungarian singing with Romanian patriotic songs. The students continued protesting at and after the ceremonial unveiling of the plaque on December 1st.80 The DAHR was not initially involved in the demonstrations; but when its appeals to the monuments commission, the prefect, and the president proved fruitless, it decided to organize a major demonstration for December 6. Some Hungarians felt the demonstration should not be a specifically Hungarian protest, but rather a protest of citizens of Cluj opposed to the mayor’s arbitrary actions. The ethnic framing prevailed; the demonstration was a protest against the defilement of a “Hungarian” statue, although Romanians were invited to participate. Thousands jammed St. Michael’s Church for a protest meeting, culminating in the singing of the Hungarian anthem, and then marched around the square in a silent procession led by László To´´kés and other prominent Hungarian figures. There was a heavy police presence, and a small number of Romanian counterdemonstrators. But there were no clashes, and no further mass mobilization in connection with the plaque. This was the largest demonstration of Hungarians in Cluj since the change of regime.81 A year and a half later, in the summer of 1994, Hungarian protests against the excavations were again focused on a threat to the statue. The concern was that the statue might be moved to accommodate an openair museum displaying the Roman ruins (as had been suggested by the county vice-prefect, a staunch ally of Funar), or that the digging would occur in the immediate proximity of the church or statue. Although Funar later disavowed the idea of moving the statue, the DAHR was able to mobilize its constituency by highlighting the danger to the beloved and beleaguered monument.82 Against a murky and shifting backdrop of public stance-taking and behind-the-scenes negotiations and jurisdictional struggles, three large demonstrations were held in June, bringing Ibid., December 1, 1992. On the installation and unveiling of the plaque, see plate 12. 81 Feischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 54–56. 82 Ibid., 57–60. The fact that Funar had on other occasions claimed the right to move the statue, and even proposed, only half in jest, that it be melted down and used to make the Avram Iancu statue (Balázs and Schwartz, Funar-korszak Kolozsváron, 85), made the threat seem more credible. On the concern that the digging might endanger the church or statue, see for example Szabadság, June 3, 9, and 21, 1994. 79 80

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together a few thousand protesters. Given the uncertainty about when and where digging would begin, and the fear of being confronted with a fait accompli, the DAHR arranged to watch the site and to summon Hungarians to the square, if needed, through the prolonged ringing of church bells. The bells did indeed ring on the morning of July 7, and Hungarians—especially elderly residents of the central district—began to arrive within minutes, sitting down where the digging was to begin.83 The police roughly removed some of the protesters, but were not willing to use force on a large scale; and the digging was postponed. Another month passed with more negotiations and jurisdictional disputes; eventually a special commission from the Ministry of Culture ruled that digging would be restricted to two of the six parts of the square originally proposed, those furthest from the statue and church. At this point, the DAHR called off the protests, but threatened further protests in the event of digging outside of the approved areas. Apart from these popular protests, the nationalizing initiatives and anti-Hungarian rhetoric of Funar and his allies elicited a steady stream of criticism from the DAHR and the local Hungarian press; conversely, DAHR ethnopolitical claims, initiatives, and declarations, whether focused on Cluj or on wider regional issues, elicited an equally steady stream of criticism from Romanian nationalists. The local press, Romanian and Hungarian, was saturated with dueling declarations and counterdeclarations, and with opinion pieces that, for the most part, took predictably nationalist stances.84 Throughout Funar’s twelve years in office, Cluj was the scene of continuous and intractable elite-level ethnonational conflict. An outside observer, reading the local press, at least during the first half of Funar’s tenure in office, might well have received the impression that “the Romanians” and “the Hungarians” were locked in fierce ethnopolitical struggle. Yet what is striking about the Funar era is not the strength but the weakness of popular ethnopolitical mobilization. The Hungarian protests were episodic rather than cumulative; since 1994, there have been very few substantial protests.85 Funar’s outraFeischmidt, Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung, 58–59. This was especially true of Funar’s first term in office. Nationalist stance-taking continued unabated thereafter, but it gradually came to be reported with less urgency and greater detachment. 85 One of the most dramatic protests in Cluj since 1994 did not occur along the HungarianRomanian fault line. This was an intra-Romanian struggle between the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches. Traditionally strong in Transylvania, the Greek Catholic Church had been banned by the communist regime in 1948; since the change of regime, when it was again legally recognized, it has been struggling, with limited success, to regain control of the church buildings that had been transferred to the Orthodox Church. In February 1998, an appeals court confirmed a lower court ruling that the centrally located, late eighteenth-century Church of the Transfiguration in Cluj should be returned to the Greek Catholic Church. When the Orthodox Church did not comply, a group of young Greek Catholics took over the church by force in 83 84

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geous gestures became routine; it was harder to get worked up about them. In marked contrast to Taˆrgu-Mures¸, ethnopolitical conflict in Cluj did not generate a polarizing spiral of popular mobilization and countermobilization. Hungarian protests against the plaque and the excavations did not provoke Romanian counterdemonstrations. Unlike Vatra Romaˆneasca˘ in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, Funar did not seek to mobilize Romanian street protests against Hungarians.86 Nor, despite his sometimes incendiary anti-Hungarian rhetoric, did he seek to provoke Hungarians into massive protests; in the case of the excavations, he sought in fact to dampen their protests by reassuring them that the statue was in no danger. His politics of outrage was cleverly calibrated; he was careful not to go too far. He did not mind being seen as “outrageous”; but he did not want to be seen as dangerous or seriously destabilizing. It was not in his interest to foment street conflict that might spin out of control. In order to be elected and twice re-elected as mayor, he could not rely on the ultranationalist vote alone. There was no incentive in Cluj for the sort of “outbidding” that can generate increasingly radical ethnopolitical demands and contribute to ethnic polarization and violence. Keeping Hungarians in their place, checking their arrogance, reminding them what country they were living in was one thing; mobilizing volatile crowds against them was something else altogether.87 Thus while Cluj under Funar was a focal point of ethnopolitical conflict, it did not become a flashpoint of ethnic violence or even of popular mobilization. In a sense, Funar’s politics of symbolic nationalization was selflimiting, even self-canceling. Visitors to Cluj during the Funar years were immediately struck by the proliferation of flags and the saturation of public space with Romanian national colors. Yet to ordinary Clujeni, Hungarian and Romanian, each succeeding initiative provoked less attention; after a while, many Clujeni scarcely noticed the tricolor flags, benches, sidewalk posts, and garbage receptacles, or the statues and March, evicting Orthodox worshippers. A week later, 2,500 Orthodox priests and students marched through Cluj in protest. On this conflict, see Szabadság, March 14, 1998; Adeva˘rul de Cluj, March 16 and 20, 1998; Iordachi, “Politics and Inter-Confessional Strife”; Mahieu, “Legal Recognition and Recovery of Property.” 86 Later in his tenure, Funar helped organize a large demonstration against the Law on Public Administration, but most participants were from out of town; see p. 153, below. 87 Funar did organize Romanian marches to counter the annual Hungarian commemorative processions on March 15. Yet these small counterprocessions never physically confronted or obstructed the Hungarian processions. And Funar never followed through on his threat to prevent Hungarians from marching. In severely divided societies, processions and marches—especially when they involve confrontations between opposed groups of marchers—have often been flashpoints for violent conflict; nothing like this occurred in Cluj under Funar.

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plaques, just as they came to pay less attention to Funar’s various pronouncements. Most Hungarians remained more sensitive to Funar’s nationalizing initiatives than did most Romanians,88 yet their significance receded for Hungarians as well. Novelist Robert Musil’s observation on the invisibility of monuments and memorials can be extended to the entire range of nationalizing initiatives undertaken by Funar: “The most striking thing about monuments and memorials is that one does not notice them. There is nothing in the world that is quite so invisible. They are no doubt erected in order to be seen, indeed precisely to attract attention; yet at the same time they are somehow made attention-proof, so that attention slides off them like drops of water off an oilcloth.” All enduring and fixed stimuli, Musil suggests—and this applies to flags and painted benches as much as to plaques and statues—lose their power to make an impression and recede into the background of our consciousness.89

Reproducing Ethnicity: A Hungarian University in Cluj? In the second half of the 1990s, while Funar’s nationalizing initiatives continued to dominate the local ethnopolitical scene, statewide nationalist politics came to focus on the Hungarian demand for the reestablishment of an autonomous Hungarian-language university in Cluj. Universities in Cluj, like those elsewhere in the region, have long been symbols of national pride, centers of nationalist activity, and vehicles for reproducing national—and nationalist—elites. As we saw in the preceding chapter, they have also been prime objects of ethnonational struggles. The first modern university in Transylvania, established in Cluj in 1872, at once symbolized and promoted Hungary’s nationalizing mission in Transylvania during the Dualist era. The abrupt Romanianization of the university in 1919 vividly symbolized the sharp reversal of nationalizing policies; in 1940, this reversal was itself reversed. 88 Such asymmetries in sensitivity to ethnic and national categories and symbols will be a central theme in the second part of our book. 89 Robert Musil, “Denkmalen,” 506–7. A passage in Ivo Andric´’s novel Bridge on the Drina, 67–69, makes a similar observation. The passage describes the emplacement of a plaque commemorating the late sixteenth-century construction of the bridge:

A great white plaque was brought, with an engraved inscription, and built into the kapia [a widening in the middle of the bridge that served as a public gathering place]. . . . The people gathered around the inscription and looked at it. . . . A hundred times those days they spelt out the verses of the tarih [inscription]. . . . But at last the people had eaten their fill and had wondered enough, walked enough and had listened to the verses of the inscription to their hearts’ content. The nine days’ wonder became part of their everyday life and they crossed the bridge hurriedly, indifferently, anxiously, absent-mindedly as the tumultuous waters that flowed beneath it, as if it were only one of the countless roads that they and their beasts trod beneath their feet. And the plaque with the inscription fell as silent as any other stone.

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After World War II, the Romanian university was restored to its interwar home, but a new Hungarian university was established alongside it. For fourteen years, parallel Romanian- and Hungarian-language universities functioned in Cluj. During this period, as we observed, universities were subjected to tight political supervision, intensive ideological indoctrination, and periodic purges. The Hungarian Bolyai University was separate, but it was certainly not autonomous. Even so, Hungarian intellectuals were distressed by the forced merger of the two universities in 1959: they had understood Bolyai University, autonomous or not, as their university, and they experienced the merger as an expropriation. The merger, moreover, portended the gradual withering away of Hungarian-language higher education: by the late 1980s, only a few subjects offered instruction in Hungarian, mainly in teacher-training courses and in Hungarian language and literature.90 It is therefore not surprising that many Hungarian intellectuals look back on the parallel universities of the postwar years as a desirable model for the organization of higher education. A separate Hungarian university is understood by the DAHR as the necessary capstone of a comprehensive, kindergarten-through-university system of Hungarian-language education. In this vision, elementary schools teach basic literacy in Hungarian, and high schools provide a broad familiarity with Hungarian history, literature, and culture; but only a university can assure the reproduction of a vital and vibrant Transylvanian Hungarian culture and prevent the assimilation or emigration of the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual and professional elite.91 For the DAHR, university-level education in Hungarian in a broad range of subjects would help make Hungarian the language not only of family, friendship, worship, general schooling, and some cultural activities, but also of specialized training and economic life; it would pave the way for Hungarian lawyers, doctors, nurses, social workers, journalists, accountants, programmers, engineers, and so on, to live their professional lives as Hungarians and in Hungarian. Hungarian-language university education does not necessarily require a separate Hungarian university; and opportunities to study in Hungarian at Babes¸-Bolyai University expanded dramatically in the 1990s.92 Apart from the symbolic significance of having a university of “one’s 90 Puskás, “A kolozsvári egyetem,” 25; Magyari et al., “A Babes ¸ -Bolyai Tudományegyetem,” 27; Diószegi and Süle, Hetven év, 86. 91 Magyari, Szilágyi, and Kása, “A Babes¸ -Bolyai Tudományegyetem,” 27; Kántor, “Nationalizing Minorities,” 259; see also the statement by Cluj DAHR leaders in Szabadság, September 30, 1998. 92 By 1999–2000, one could study in Hungarian in forty-one specializations, up from fifteen in 1993–94; by comparison, one could study in Romanian in eighty-six specializations in 1999–2000 (Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 103).

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own,” and the historical claim to restore an institution understood to have been illegitimately abolished, a separate university is seen by the DAHR as a more effective barrier against assimilation than Hungarian courses of study in a largely Romanian institution. In a Hungarian university, students would be encapsulated in a Hungarian world, as is now the case for students who attend Hungarian elementary and high schools. This encapsulation does not result from the content of the curriculum (which is in many respects identical to that of Romanian institutions); it results from the fact that, within Hungarian institutions, students speak Hungarian and associate with other Hungarians as a matter of course, without having to choose or make an effort to do so. High school networks shape patterns of sociability later in life and provide an institutional basis for ethnic endogamy; this, in turn, helps reproduce ethnicity intergenerationally and retards (even if it cannot entirely prevent) processes of assimilation.93 The social foundations for ethnic endogamy, and therefore for the reproduction of ethnicity, would be strengthened if the existing network of Hungarian high schools were crowned by a Hungarian university, especially if this led, as the DAHR believes it would, to an expansion of the incipient Hungarian ethnic economy.94 The DAHR also favors a separate Hungarian university for pragmatic reasons. A separate university would place Hungarian-language university education on a more secure institutional footing and protect it from being reduced or eliminated; it would also ensure Hungarian administrative control over curriculum, budget, student admissions, faculty appointments, and so on.95 93 On the interlocking institutions that comprise the Hungarian “world” in Cluj, and the manner in which they contribute to the reproduction of ethnicity over time, see chapter 9. 94 In 1998–99, only about a third of Hungarian university students in Romania were studying in Hungarian (Tonk, “Romániai magyar magánegyetem”). In many nominally Hungarian lines of study at the Babes¸-Bolyai University, moreover, only some courses are offered in Hungarian, and students take other courses in Romanian-language classes along with Romanian students. A comprehensive Hungarian university, the DAHR argues, would substantially increase the fraction of Hungarian university students pursuing their studies in Hungarian—and in a fully Hungarian educational and social milieu. Some Hungarian students, however, choose to study in Romanian even when they could study in Hungarian, believing this will help them find a good job; an independent Hungarian university would not necessarily change this calculation. Studying in Hungarian at the university level, moreover, may encourage some students to look for jobs in Hungary, undermining the DAHR project of ethnic reproduction; we return to this theme in the epilogue. 95 In principle, institutional security and autonomous administrative control over Hungarianlanguage education could be realized within the framework of the Babes¸-Bolyai University by changing the governance structure of the university and, in particular, by creating autonomous Hungarian faculties or departments. With support from the OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities, the DAHR pursued this strategy alongside its effort to re-establish a separate Hungarian university; but this yielded only modest changes in university governance. For an authoritative account, see Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 104–16.

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The call to re-establish the Bolyai University was one of the first Hungarian claims advanced in December 1989.96 Given the complexity of the issue, this was bound (even in the most propitious circumstances) to involve protracted discussions and negotiations. And circumstances were decidedly not propitious: after a brief initial openness to Hungarian claims immediately after the overthrow of Ceaus¸escu, the governments formed by Ion Iliescu’s National Salvation Front and its successor, the Romanian Party of Social Democracy, were generally opposed to DAHR claims, though they were willing to support additional Hungarianlanguage instruction at Babes¸-Bolyai University. The re-establishment of Bolyai University remained a central DAHR goal, but there was no realistic opportunity to pursue it.97 This changed in 1996, when the Democratic Convention won the elections and the DAHR joined the governing coalition. In this new political situation, the university issue moved to the top of the DAHR agenda. But the DAHR’s coalition partners, under fire from nationalist opposition parties, resisted the demand for an independent Hungarian university.98 They were willing to support the expansion of Hungarianlanguage university education within Babes¸-Bolyai University, now redefined as a “multicultural” university with instruction in Romanian, Hungarian, and German.99 But they criticized the “separatism” underlying the demand for a Hungarian university, portraying this as contrary to “European” models of integration and multiculturalism.100 Another 96 The call featured in the proclamation drafted by a group of intellectuals in Cluj the day after Ceaus¸escu’s flight and capture; it was elaborated two weeks later in a declaration on the university signed by about 150 Hungarian intellectuals, mainly those who had taught at Bolyai before the merger or at Babes¸-Bolyai University. The texts were published in Szabadság, December 24, 1989, and January 7, 1990. 97 Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 102. In the first half of the 1990s, considerable debate focused on the drafting of a new education law. Adopted in June 1995, this was sharply criticized by the DAHR as a step backward, and as having been influenced by the ultranationalist parties that were then members of the governing coalition (Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 93ff.). The DAHR organized demonstrations in several Transylvanian towns in the fall of 1995; it even threatened a campaign of civil disobedience, though nothing came of this (Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 186). 98 On the way in which the university issue became a key site of symbolic struggles, see Magyari-Vincze, “Universitatea din Cluj,” 231–35; idem, “Egyetemépítés 1989 után”; and Andreescu, “O alta˘ criza˘.” 99 Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 105ff. 100 The rector of Babes ¸ -Bolyai University, for example, argued that the “current European approach legitimizes multiculturalism and not ethnic separation” (Marga, “Multiculturalismul,” 7). Similar arguments about “separatism” have been made about all Hungarian-language schooling, not only about a Hungarian university (and not only in Romania: on conflicts over Hungarian schools in southern Slovakia in the first half of the 1990s, see Langman, “Mother-Tongue Education versus Bilingual Education”). In a sense, those who characterize the DAHR demand for a Hungarian university (or for Hungarian-language schooling in general) as “separatist” are correct. As we noted above, a Hungarian university is seen as strengthening the Hungarian “world,”

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common argument against a separate university was that it would represent a dangerous step toward the “federalization” of the state.101 In the face of this resistance, the DAHR threatened in September 1998 to leave the coalition—and deprive the government of its parliamentary majority—if its demands were not met by the end of the month. The crisis was averted by a compromise proposal to set up an independent, state-financed Hungarian-German university in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ and Sibiu. Yet the “Peto´´fi-Schiller University” (named after the great Hungarian and German poets) was never established. The proposal was challenged in court by opposition parties; the government dragged its feet (and suggested that teaching should be in Romanian as well as in Hungarian and German); and the DAHR—never enthusiastic about the HungarianGerman model, or about the location—did not insist, pressing instead, with limited success, for autonomous Hungarian structures within Babes¸-Bolyai University.102 Meanwhile, with support from the nationalist government of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and from the Hungarian churches, two Hungarian-language private universities were established after legislation made this possible in 1999.103 A state-funded Hungarian university in Cluj remains on the DAHR agenda, but the issue lost much of its urgency. The university struggle was focused on Cluj, but it was not happening in Cluj. As the historical center of Hungarian culture in Transylvania, and the contemporary center of Transylvanian intellectual life, Cluj was seen by the DAHR as the most appropriate site—and by some Hungarians, as the only appropriate site—for a Hungarian university. The DAHR had framed the issue by demanding not just any Hungarian university, but the re-establishment of Bolyai University in Cluj. Yet most Clujeni were largely indifferent to this struggle. Hungarian intellectuals from Cluj had formulated the initial demand in 1989; the Bolyai Association, composed mainly of Hungarian professors at Babes¸-Bolyai University, consistently advocated the re-establishment of Bolyai University; the issue was discussed, sometimes heatedly, among faculty and administrators of Babes¸Bolyai University; and Szabadság maintained a continuous interest in the

and the insulation of that world from the wider society is understood as the best defense against assimilation. Institutional integration, on this understanding, cannot help but contribute in the long run to assimilation; minority ethnopolitical entrepreneurs therefore regularly promote institutional separation as a means of preventing or retarding assimilation. 101 Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 109. 102 Ibid., 110–16; Mandel, “Az RMDSZ oktatáspolitikája,” 95. 103 The Partium Christian University, organized by the Calvinist Church and Calvinist Bishop László To´´kés, was established in Oradea in 1999. The more ambitious Transylvanian Hungarian University, with its symbolic headquarters in Cluj and campuses in Miercurea-Ciuc, TaˆrguMures¸, and Cluj, began operations in the fall of 2001.

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subject.104 Yet outside the university, and the pages of the local newspapers, the university dispute was played out in Bucharest, not in Cluj. It inspired no significant mobilization in Cluj, Hungarian or Romanian; there was no counterpart to the street demonstrations of 1990 in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. More strikingly, the issue did not mobilize or energize university students themselves; even Hungarian students, in whose name the struggle was being waged, were unmoved, uninvolved, and largely indifferent.105 Counting and Categorizing Romania’s second postcommunist census was carried out in the spring of 2002. Censuses are never simply technical exercises in counting; they are always sites of political and cultural struggles over the representation— and thereby in part over the constitution—of the social world. Demographic numbers often have political consequences, material and symbolic. Where political or economic resources are allocated in proportion to population, they can govern who is entitled to what; where rights or resources are contingent on numerical thresholds, censuses can determine whether or not provisions come into effect. More generally, censuses provide group-mobilizing and group-making entrepreneurs the opportunity to demonstrate the strength—but also the risk of exposing the weakness— of the group in whose name they claim to speak.106 Transylvanian Hungarian leaders were heavily invested in the 2002 enumeration, and they sought to mobilize their constituency for the 104 This does not mean that all Hungarian intellectuals supported the idea. Survey data published initially in Szabadság by a local Hungarian sociologist showing ambivalence among Hungarian students about a separate university (and a preference for greater autonomy within the Babes¸-Bolyai University) generated a heated debate about the appropriateness of the university— and about the appropriateness of publishing data that could be interpreted as undercutting Hungarian ethnopolitical claims (see Magyari, “Az egyetemro´´l magyar diákszemmel”). Skeptics among Hungarian intellectuals were concerned that a separate university would lack adequate professional standards and would subordinate intellectual autonomy to a political agenda (see Cs. Gyimesi, “Sok a tervezo´´,” and Magyari-Vincze, “Intézményfejlesztési törekvések és dilemmák.”) 105 See Fox, “Missing the Mark.” 106 Inspired largely by Bourdieu and Foucault, a substantial literature of the last two decades has addressed the ways in which censuses—and, more broadly, official statistics—construct and constitute (as opposed to merely recording) knowledge of populations. This literature has examined how censuses have inculcated a certain way of seeing—what James Scott has called “seeing like a state” in his book by that name—premised on the idea that national societies are bounded wholes, composed of discrete, countable, mutually exclusive ethnic, racial, or cultural groups. Even when census categories are initially remote from prevailing self-understandings, they may be taken up by cultural and political entrepreneurs and eventually reshape subjective identifications (Starr, “The Sociology of Official Statistics”; Petersen, “Politics and the Measurement of Ethnicity”). Especially when they are linked through public policy to tangible benefits, official census categories can have the effect of “making up people” or “nominating into existence” new kinds of persons (Hacking, “Making Up People”; Goldberg, “Taking Stock,” 29–30). For an overview of studies of censuses that focus on ethnicity, race, and nationality, see Kertzer and

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event.107 Their efforts were particularly intensive, and particularly contentious, in Cluj. Elsewhere in Transylvania, the 2002 census was a fairly routine bureaucratic undertaking, mobilizing Hungarian leaders, but not Romanian nationalists. In Cluj, however, the census was an object of heated ethnopolitical contention. The struggle in Cluj focused on the threshold above which the use of minority languages was mandated in local administration and public communication.108 Since 2001, members of national minorities have had the right to communicate orally and in writing with the local administration in their mother tongue in localities where they comprise at least 20 percent of the population.109 Local authorities are obliged to employ persons knowing the minority language in such districts, and to post public inscriptions, including road signs, in the minority language as well as in Romanian. Although Hungarians comprised 23 percent of the population of Cluj according to the 1992 census, Mayor Funar refused to implement the

Arel, eds., Census and Identity. For theoretically informed case studies, see among others Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich, on ethnonational struggles over the language question in the Austrian censuses of 1880–1910; Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” on cultural objectification and the recording of caste in British censuses in late nineteenth-century India; Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood, on statistics and the making of the Italian nation-state; Hirsch, Empire of Nations, on the role of ethnographers in constructing nationality categories in the Soviet Union; and Loveman, “Nation-State Building, ‘Race,’ and the Production of Official Statistics,” on race and nation in Brazil. 107 Roma and Greek Catholic leaders, too, were keenly interested in the census. Roma leaders sought to mobilize their constituents to declare their ethnicity as Roma; they later claimed that the official results—which showed a modest increase in the number of Roma, from 410,000 (1.8 percent of the population) in 1992 to 535,000 (2.5 percent)—massively undercounted the Roma population. See for example “Resemnare mioritica˘, în urma recensa˘maˆntului din 2002,” Curentul, July 5, 2002; Monitorul de Cluj, July 9, 2002. Greek Catholic religious leaders, as we observed above, had been seeking since the change of regime to win back adherents (and church property) from the Orthodox Church (to which most Greek Catholics had turned, and to which church property had been given, when the Greek Catholic Church was banned in 1948). The census would provide a public accounting of the success—or failure—of this attempt; church leaders feared that Greek Catholics might be unwittingly counted as Orthodox, since the default category on the census form was Orthodox, while other religious affiliations had to be specified (see Adeva˘rul de Cluj, January 29, 2002). Iordachi, “Politics and Inter-Confessional Strife” notes that the Orthodox position was that property should be retroceded only in proportion to the number of affiliates in each locality, making the census, in effect, the arbiter of the extent of property restitution (the Greek Catholic position was that all property should be returned, since it had been illegally seized). 108 Numerical thresholds are commonly used to specify rights to minority-language schooling and provisions for the public use of minority languages; see Kertzer and Arel, Census and Identity, 31. 109 These provisions were first introduced in a 1997 decree that was suspended for procedural reasons by the Constitutional Court in 1998; they were re-enacted in substantially the same form in a 2001 law on public administration. The 20 percent threshold pertains mainly to Hungarians, but applies in a few cases to Ukrainians and Roma. On the legislative history, and the role of the DAHR, part of the coalition government since 1996, in pushing for these provisions, see Horváth, “Facilitating Conflict Transformation,” 81–85.

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minority-language provisions.110 He noted that Romanian was specified in the Constitution as the official language of the state. In a characteristic gesture, he erected large signs in the Romanian national colors quoting this and a few other extracts from the Constitution in several locations around town;111 and he organized a large demonstration in Cluj in “defense of the Romanian language and the Constitution.”112 But Funar’s main argument was demographic. The minority-language provisions could not be applied in Cluj, he claimed, for the 1992 census figures were no longer accurate.113 The Hungarian population of Cluj had been shrinking, and Hungarians—or as Funar often called them, Hungarian-speaking Romanians—comprised no more than 11 percent of the population.114 It was in this context that the 2002 census emerged as a site of ethnopolitical struggle.115 For the DAHR, this meant showing that Hungarians still comprised more than 20 percent of the population; for Funar and his associates, it meant showing the opposite.116 Many nationally minded Hungarians had questioned the validity of previous Romanian censuses, which had charted a steady decline in the Hungarian population. The DAHR president, a political moderate, claimed that the 1992 census, which put the number of Hungarians at 110 See plates 5c–d. Implementation of the provisions was delayed or obstructed in other localities as well. See for example RFE/RL Newsline, August 16, 2001, “Hungarian minority leader dissatisfied with implementation of Romanian law.” 111 Szabadság, February 12, 2001; Monitorul de Cluj, February 12, 2001. See plate 5a. 112 Although Funar had announced that 100,000 would attend this “Great Popular Assembly,” a local Romanian paper put the crowd at 5,000, most of them supporters of the Greater Romania Party who were bused in from elsewhere. The paper’s frankly dismissive report (the article was subtitled “Great Popular Assembly of Cluj, without Clujeni”) also observed that there was more interest in the popular musical program that had been arranged than in the long, rambling speech of GRP President (and Romania’s most prominent extreme nationalist) Corneliu Vadim Tudor. This was the largest Romanian nationalist demonstration in Cluj during Funar’s tenure, but it did not mobilize large numbers of Clujeni. See Monitorul de Cluj, February 17, 2001. 113 This was a political argument, not a serious legal argument; legal provisions clearly mandated the use of 1992 census figures. 114 Monitorul de Cluj, May 15 and 24, 2001; Szabadság, May 23, 2001. 115 In ethnically divided societies, Donald Horowitz has observed, a census can become a kind of election—an ethnodemographic battleground in which parties compete to “win” the census. The flip side of this is that an election is often in effect a census, calling into question a basic presupposition of democratic theory: that ethnic demography is not electoral destiny and, more generally, that elections are not determined in advance by prepolitical identities (Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 83–87, 196). On the manner in which elections have indeed served as a kind of census for Transylvanian Hungarians (though not for Transylvanian Romanians), see chapter 12, p. 343n17. 116 At stake in the census was not only the concrete question of whether the Hungarian share of the population would fall on one side or the other of the 20 percent threshold, but also—as is often the case—broader, more diffuse, and, for nationally minded Hungarians, emotionally charged issues concerning the fate of “Hungariandom” in Cluj and Transylvania. We return to these issues in the epilogue.

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1.6 million, had failed to count at least 200,000 Hungarians.117 Against the background of this fairly widespread skepticism about the neutrality and accuracy of the census, the DAHR was concerned that Hungarians might be undercounted in the 2002 census.118 They were especially concerned about an undercount in Cluj, fearing that Funar might interfere with the census in order to keep the number of Hungarians below the 20 percent threshold. Concerns about the integrity of the census prompted the Cluj County DAHR to attempt to “register” the Hungarian population in the summer of 2001.119 This was seen as a check on the census and as a means of preventing an undercount of Hungarians.120 The local DAHR placed notices in Szabadság urging Hungarians to report to their local neighborhood DAHR offices to be registered. The DAHR could draw on its own membership records for this purpose, and on those of the local Hungarian churches; to register those not otherwise included, it planned to send its dues collectors door to door. Yet this raised not only logistical but conceptual questions. Short of duplicating the census itself—for which the DAHR obviously lacked the resources—the DAHR had no reliable way of identifying those not included on DAHR or church rosters. Dues collectors were to look for Hungarian names on the lists of residents posted at the entrance to many larger apartment buildings or on nameplates on the doors of flats.121 This is a reasonably good way of finding people who identify as Hungarian, but it is hopeless as a technique for 117 Szabadság, March 30, 2002. On the other hand, many nationally minded Romanians argued that Hungarians had been overcounted in the previous census; many Roma, it was argued, had declared themselves Hungarian. In a self-caricaturingly extreme statement of this view, Funar asserted that more than half a million Gypsies had been “blackmailed or bought” to declare themselves Hungarian; the real number of “Romanians of Hungarian origin” in Romania, he claimed, was less than 300,000 (RFE/RL Newsline, February 21, 1995). 118 Some Hungarian demographers, however, challenged the widespread belief that Hungarians had been undercounted in the 1992 census; see for example Veres, “A romániai magyarság létszámcsökkenésének.” 119 The registration project was also connected to an ongoing debate within the DAHR about how to pursue the party’s aim of constituting an autonomous (and in certain spheres selfgoverning) Hungarian community. Some argued that if autonomy was to be more than a vague ideal, members of the self-governing national community must be formally identified in a register of names; the persons thus registered would then be entitled to vote in the “internal elections” the DAHR had long aspired to organize. Others objected in principle to the idea of formally constituting a register of all Hungarians; still others were skeptical about its feasibility. See Toró, “Szövetségi belso´´ választások”; Szabadság, December 7, 2001, and November 30, 2002. The term used in Hungarian for the register, kataszter, evokes the “national cadastres” that were widely envisioned—and in a few cases actually employed—in the final years of the Habsburg Empire in an experiment at constituting national communities as legally recognized but nonterritorial corporate entities in areas of mixed population; see chapter 1, p. 41n31. 120 See the interview with Sándor Kónya-Hamar, Cluj county DAHR president and a leading proponent of the registration project, in Erdélyi Napló, May 29, 2001; see also the progress reports in Szabadság, June 19 and August 3, 2001. 121 Interview with volunteer at local DAHR office, August 2001.

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finding all (or even almost all) such people. Apart from the fact that names are not always posted, many Hungarians would be missed in this manner, including many of those in mixed households and those who displayed Romanianized versions of their names.122 Yet the entire point of the registration—to serve as a check on the census—required it to be comprehensive. Perhaps for these reasons, the door-to-door survey appears never to have been carried out. The DAHR reported that large numbers of Hungarians had responded to the call to be registered; but the effort to undertake a complete registration that could serve as a check on the census did not and could not succeed. In early 2002, attention turned to the approaching census itself. Working both together and separately, the DAHR, the Hungarian churches, and the daily newspaper Szabadság sought to educate and mobilize Hungarians so as to make sure all were counted—and counted as Hungarian. A succession of solemn opinion pieces in Szabadság explained what was at stake: the 20 percent threshold was emphasized, of course, but so, too, was the broader symbolic and political significance of the census. On the eve of the enumeration, the newspaper described the census as a “question of our fate”: “The census results convey not only numbers. Behind the census numbers stand we ourselves, the community of those who freely affirm our Hungarian national identity; the rights and abiding strength of that community are also grounded in our share of the population.”123 On the same day, a joint statement of leading church figures declared that “in the spirit of our religious traditions, it is an obligation of faith and morality to affirm our religious and national identities.” And as the census got underway, a Catholic clergyman, writing in Szabadság, underscored the urgency of the occasion: “Everyone who identifies as Hungarian counts! The time has passed when one could comfortably avoid belonging anywhere, and avoid making the least sacrifice for the community. At last one must declare where one stands! . . . Let us not forget for a moment: this is about us, our survival, our future.”124 On a more practical level, a series of articles in Szabadság and DAHR flyers explained census procedures in great detail.125 Readers were reminded that family members temporarily living abroad (including migrant workers) could be counted, and that the ethnicity of children of mixed marriages under fourteen years of age was to be determined by the parents. They were cautioned against using regional categories like “Transylvanian” in response to the question on ethnicity, since such anAs we will see in chapter 7, names are not always reliable cues to ethnicity. Szabadság, March 16, 2002. 124 Ibid., March 18, 2002. 125 See plate 7. 122 123

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swers would be recorded as “Romanian.” Since some Hungarians claimed not to have been visited by enumerators at the time of the previous census, readers were instructed whom to call if this occurred, and they were informed how to register a complaint about any irregularities. Readers were invited to call a toll-free number with any questions they might have about the census.126 Szabadság called on Hungarians to be vigilant during the enumeration itself. “If possible, one should watch while the form is being filled out, or check it afterwards, to make sure maghiara˘ [Hungarian] was written under the headings etnie [ethnicity] and limba materna˘ [native language].” The census form should be signed, the DAHR urged, only after verifying the correctness of the information. Ideally, the enumerator should fill in the numerical codes—listed by the newspaper—for ethnicity, mother tongue, and religion, and not simply record the verbal answers.127 Responding to reports that some census forms for Hungarian households had been filled out in pencil during the previous census (which raised concerns that the information might later have been altered), the paper reported that enumerators were obliged to fill out forms “with black or blue pens in large block letters.”128 Before the enumeration began, discussion had been confined largely to the Hungarian public sphere. Once the census got underway, Funar made frequent public statements. He accused the DAHR of busing in Hungarians from the Szekler land to be counted in Cluj, bribing Romanians of Hungarian ancestry to declare themselves Hungarian, and appealing to local Roma to do the same by suggesting that this would qualify them for the benefits granted to transborder ethnic Hungarians under the terms of Hungary’s recently adopted “Status Law.”129 He threatened to investigate suspicious cases, and suggested that people could be punished for giving false responses. Over the protests of census supervisors, Funar demanded daily tallies by ethnicity, native language, and religion.130 The DAHR countered that the mayor had no authority to monitor or Szabadság, February 23, March 16, and March 18, 2002. Ibid., March 18, 2002. 128 Ibid. 129 Monitorul de Cluj, March 18 and 23, 2002; Adeva ˘ rul de Cluj, March 23, 2002; Szabadság, March 23 and 25, 2002. On the Status Law, see p. 126. DAHR President Markó admitted that the Status Law might have induced some people (he did not specify Roma) to declare themselves Hungarian, but he argued that these were people linked by multiple threads to Hungarian communal life (Szabadság, March 28, 2002). It is not implausible that some who might in other contexts identify as Roma here identified as Hungarian by ethnicity, especially since many Roma in Cluj speak Hungarian. Interestingly, the number of those identifying as Roma in Cluj declined slightly between 1992 and 2002, from 3,210 to 3,029, while in Romania as a whole, the number of those so identifying increased by about 135,000. Some Roma leaders also claimed after the census that many Roma had declared themselves Hungarian (Monitorul de Cluj, April 3, 2002; Szabadság, April 9, 2002). 130 Monitorul de Cluj, March 23, 2002. 126 127

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interfere with the census; it accused Funar of attempting to intimidate Clujeni, and emphasized that there was no legal basis for investigating or punishing anyone for freely declaring their ethnicity.131 Despite these mutual recriminations, the ten-day period during which the census was carried out was not a time of heightened tension for ordinary Clujeni.132 The enumerators’ visits themselves—and the barrage of information and advice that preceded them—no doubt temporarily heightened awareness of ethnicity, at least among Hungarians. And Hungarians in particular did appear well informed about the census procedures, thanks to the DAHR and media campaign. Yet few Hungarians shared the sense of urgency that had been articulated by journalists and by political and religious leaders.133 Few were mobilized or engaged either by the immediate issue at stake—the 20 percent threshold and the provisions for the public use of Hungarian—or by the broader elite discourse about ethnic survival. (One middle-aged Hungarian man observed later that the information campaign was “a bit much,” since “after all, it’s not like this was an election”—an ironic counterpart to the fact that Hungarian leaders had treated the census precisely as an election). Moreover, while a few Hungarians watched intently as their ethnicity was recorded on the form, suspicion was not displayed in the enumerations we observed.134 Enumerators were generally assigned to work in their own neighborhoods, and they often knew, at least by sight, and sometimes by name, the people they were assigned to visit. This made the census experience less impersonal, and it may have helped to establish trust. Just two days after the enumeration was concluded, Mayor Funar released figures purporting to show that Hungarians comprised 18.45 percent of the population.135 Even that number, he claimed, was inflated by 131 Szabadság, March 23 and 27, 2002. From a legal point of view, the choice of ethnicity in the census is entirely a matter of subjective self-identification. 132 Grancea was in Cluj during this period, and she accompanied four enumerators on their rounds in three districts, visiting a total of sixty households, including about twenty in which Hungarian families were visited by Romanian enumerators. She also returned later to interview people from twelve households. This paragraph is based on her observations and interviews. 133 During the final days of the census, a public meeting was organized to discuss the demographic situation of Transylvanian Hungarians, in connection with the publication of a special issue on that subject by a leading Transylvanian Hungarian periodical. Reporting on the event, Szabadság noted that attendance was sparse despite the presence of the top statewide DAHR leadership. The lack of public interest in the event and the fact that the sparse attendance was seen as newsworthy by Szabadság nicely illustrate the gap between much of the Transylvanian Hungarian elite—urgently concerned with the census and with ethnodemographic trends—and the Transylvanian Hungarian population as a whole (Szabadság, March 28, 2002). 134 Two of the three Romanian enumerators Grancea observed seemed to be aware of the possibility that Hungarians might be distrustful; they sought to reassure Hungarians by entering the numerical code for Hungarian ethnicity on the spot, even though their instructions did not oblige them to do so. 135 Monitorul de Cluj, March 30, 2002; Szabadság, March 30, 2002.

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Hungarian abuses (he had earlier claimed that the Hungarian share was less than 11 percent). The DAHR’s initial response was defiance: “That’s a joke!,” exclaimed János Boros, the Hungarian deputy mayor of Cluj. “If Funar puts the proportion of Hungarians around 19 percent, then our numbers hover around 21 percent.”136 Like other Hungarian politicians, Boros also castigated the mayor for illegally releasing figures he had no authority to disclose. Two weeks later, Funar announced corrected (though still unofficial) figures, putting the Hungarian share of the population at 18.83 percent; and he took the opportunity to declare “victory” in the struggle over the use of Hungarian in the public life of the city. Again, the DAHR was incredulous: the latest announcement was “further proof that these data have no relation to reality; Funar says something different on each occasion.”137 Yet while the DAHR blasted Funar’s illegal disclosures, it did not challenge the fairness of the census itself, and it expressed confidence that the official results would be reliable.138 Having investigated complaints it received, the local DAHR concluded that the census had not involved “serious irregularities,” thanks to its campaign of information and mobilization, and thanks to the vigilance with which the DAHR had followed the enumeration.139 Equally significantly, the DAHR did not seek to challenge Funar’s figures on the basis of its own efforts to register the Hungarian population. Asked about this by a Hungarian journalist, a county DAHR leader indicated that the registration (which began the preceding summer) was not yet complete. He claimed that more than 50,000 Hungarians had been registered, and said cautiously that once the registration was complete, “it might well turn out that the number of Hungarians in Cluj did not fall below 20 percent.”140 But the DAHR never made public the results of the attempted registration. As it turned out, Funar’s figures were very close to the official results released three months later, which put the Hungarian share of the population at just less than 19 percent. In absolute numbers, there were nearly 15,000 fewer Hungarians in 2002 than in 1992, a decline of nearly 20 percent. Romanian newspapers highlighted the fact that Funar had won his struggle against bilingual signs and against the use of Hungarian in Szabadság, March 30 and April 11, 2002. Monitorul de Cluj, April 11, 2002; Szabadság, April 11, 2002. Szabadság, April 11, 2002. 139 Ibid., March 29, 2002. The paper reported that of the approximately one hundred complaints that the DAHR had received, about thirty were well founded, and that in those cases the problems were resolved after being brought to the attention of the census authorities. Some Hungarian nationalists, in line with their general criticism of the DAHR for being too cautious, disputed the claim that the DAHR had done everything it could to ensure the fairness of the count; see “Jó és rossz hírek a csángómagyaroktól,” Erdélyi Napló, April 2, 2002. 140 Szabadság, April 11, 2002. 136 137 138

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local administration; as one paper commented, “Cluj will not become Kolozsvár.”141 Although Funar’s obstructionism and the struggle to “win the census” focused unusual attention on the ethnic demography of Cluj in 2002, in larger perspective the census simply documented the continuation of the nearly century-long process, discussed in the previous chapter, through which the Hungarian town of the early twentieth century became the Romanian city of today.142 Nor is this continuing process of Romanianization unique to Cluj; similar declines were registered elsewhere, including the two other towns with the largest Hungarian populations.143 The 2002 census revealed that Hungarians had lost their majority in TaˆrguMures¸ for the first time; and Oradea, on the Hungarian border, lost nearly a quarter of its Hungarian residents (table 4.1). While Funar and his associates were pleased by these trends, the larger picture revealed by the census was more disturbing—and not just to nationalists. Countrywide, the census revealed an unexpectedly large 5 percent decline in the population of Romania during the preceding decade. Prime Minister Na˘stase called this a “serious and alarming signal,” adding that Romania “cannot afford to lose a million residents in ten years.”144 Media reports played up the fact that, among sizeable census categories, only the Roma population grew. Yet the decline of the Hungarian population was much more dramatic: countrywide, it shrank by nearly 200,000, or almost 12 percent, since 1992. The DAHR did not challenge the results, which confirmed what many Hungarians sensed from their own experience. The defeat in Cluj was placed in the context of the broader decline of Transylvanian Hungariandom. Essayists, especially from the older generation, lamented the apparently irreversible trajectory in a tone of high pathos; demographers argued over the relative importance of low fertility, assimilation, and emigration; and DAHR leaders spoke of working out a strategy to arrest the decline.145 We return to this broader theme in the epilogue.146 141 Monitorul de Cluj, July 6, 2002. The story was reported in the statewide press as well: see “Prin sca˘derea populat¸iei maghiare sub 20%,” Adeva˘ rul, July 6, 2002, and “Maghiarii nu mai pot cere amplasarea pla˘cut¸elor bilingve,” Curentul, July 6, 2002. 142 See chapter 3, pp.110ff. 143 See Kiss, “A népességfogyás ‘kontextusa.’ ” 144 Monitorul de Cluj, July 4, 2002. 145 For laments, see Szabadság, July 11 and 22, 2002; and “Aki(k)ért a harang szól,” Erdélyi Napló, July 23, 2002. For preliminary demographic analyses, see Varga, “A romániai magyarság népességcsökkenésének okairól” and the commentaries on Varga’s analysis in Magyar Kisebbség, no. 4, 2002; Horváth, “A 2002-es romániai népszámlálás”; Kiss, “A romániai magyarság a 1992-es és 2002-es népszámlálások tükrében”; Szilágyi, “Az asszimiláció és hatása”; Veres, “A romániai magyarság természetes népmozgalma.” For DAHR strategies, see Szabadság, July 11, 13, and 20, 2002. 146 On assimilation and emigration, see also chapter 9, pp. 297ff. and chapter 11, p. 317.

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Table 4.1. Population of Târgu-Mures¸ and Oradea by Ethnic Identification, 1910–2002 Romanian Year

Total

Hungarian

Other

Population

%

Population

%

Population

%

Tˆargu-Mure¸s 1910 25,517 1930 38,517 1948 47,043 1956 65,194 1966 80,912 1977 127,783 1992 161,216 2002 150,041

1,717 9,493 11,007 14,315 22,072 44,491 74,549 75,533

6.7 24.6 23.4 22.0 27.3 34.8 46.2 50.3

22,790 25,359 34,943 50,174 58,208 81,234 83,239 70,108

89.3 65.8 74.3 77.0 71.9 63.6 51.6 46.7

1,010 3,665 1,093 705 632 2,058 3,428 4,400

4.0 9.5 2.3 1.1 0.8 1.6 2.1 2.9

Oradea 1910 1930 1948 1956 1966 1977 1992 2002

3,604 20,914 26,998 34,501 55,785 91,925 144,244 145,284

5.6 25.3 32.8 34.9 45.5 53.9 64.8 70.3

58,421 55,039 52,541 62,804 65,141 75,125 74,225 56,985

91.0 66.6 63.9 63.5 53.2 44.1 33.3 27.6

2,144 6,734 2,743 1,645 1,608 3,481 4,272 4,345

3.3 8.1 3.3 1.7 1.3 2.0 1.9 2.1

64,169 82,687 82,282 98,950 122,534 170,531 222,741 206,614

Source: Census data reported in Varga, ed., Erdély etnikai és felekezeti statisztikája, available online at http://varga.adatbank.transindex.ro/. 2002 census figures are from http://adatbazis.mtaki.hungary.com/ ?mtaki_id=500004&settlement_name=. Data for 1880–1966 are from questions on mother tongue; data for 1977–2002 are from questions on ethnic nationality.

Conclusion Cluj after Ceaus¸escu has been a rich venue for political theater. An extreme nationalist mayor, inclined to provocative gestures and inflammatory rhetoric, dominated local politics for twelve years. The Mayor’s archnemesis, the Cluj-based DAHR, made strong—and in the perspective of some Romanians, extreme—nationalist claims of its own. During Funar’s first term, local conflicts were doubled by equally intractable statewide nationalist contention. Yet there was little popular nationalist mobilization in Cluj, and little fear of violent confrontation. There were some tense moments early on, notably after the violence in TaˆrguMures¸, which some feared might spread to Cluj, and again in the early phases of Funar’s tenure, when the DAHR organized a few substantial protests against the mayor’s initiatives. Yet on the whole protests were

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few, sporadic, and weak, and there was no polarizing spiral of popular mobilization and countermobilization. In charting the differing course of events in Cluj and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ in the months after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, we highlighted differences in ethnodemographic trajectories, post-Ceaus¸escu leadership structures, and regional contexts. And in underscoring the surprising absence of fear and the weakness of popular mobilization in Cluj under Funar, we observed that the mayor was more calculating than his rhetoric would suggest: interested in winning re-election and building his power base, he had no incentive to go beyond symbolic nationalization and verbal intimidation to promote physical intimidation of Hungarians, street confrontations, or mass mobilization of Romanians. We noted that Funar’s aggressive gestures and rhetoric gradually lost their capacity to shock and provoke; as they became routinized, Funar came to seem less dangerous than ridiculous. These are elements of an explanation for the quiescence in Cluj; but they are not, of course, a full explanation. Our study—focused on exploring and explaining the everyday workings of ethnicity in a setting characterized by intractable elite-level ethnonational conflict—has not been designed to provide a full explanation. A study focused on the lack of ethnonational violence would have to be comparative throughout; and the central comparison would have to be between Transylvania or Romania as a whole and other regions or countries, not between Cluj and other towns.147 Within Transylvania, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ceaus¸escu, Cluj and Taˆrgu-Mures¸ followed strikingly different paths; and we have identified some reasons for that difference. Yet in wider comparative perspective, and with greater distance from the change of regime, the events in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, profoundly unsettling though they were at the time, have come to seem like a relatively minor and isolated exception.148 For a sustained study of ethnonational 147 Some studies of ethnic violence do of course take cities, towns, or other localities as units of analysis. Varshney’s Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life—to cite just one exemplary work—takes Indian cities as its units of analysis, and argues that robust intercommunal civic engagement reduces the likelihood of Hindu-Muslim violence. A city-focused design was made possible in this case by the large number of Hindu-Muslim riots in India over a fifty-year period, and by the substantial variation among otherwise similar cities, with much of the violence occurring in a relatively small number of “riot-prone” cities. Within Transylvania, with a single—and, in comparative perspective, quite limited—instance of ethnic violence in a single town, no comparable design would be possible. 148 Although there has been no further Hungarian-Romanian ethnonational violence in Transylvania since the Taˆrgu-Mures¸ episode, the first half of the 1990s saw a series of violent attacks on Roma in villages; in many cases, the houses of Roma families were set on fire, typically in the wake of some incident or crime for which Roma had been held responsible by non-Roma villagers. On anti-Roma violence in postcommunist Romania, see for example Haller, “Lynching Is Not a Crime.”

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violence, Transylvania would figure more appropriately as a unit in an interregional comparison than as the domain of an intraregional one.149 Taking Transylvania or Romania as the unit of analysis would invite comparison with postcommunist cases in which violence did occur (such as Yugoslavia, Transcaucasia, and Moldova) and with others in which, despite heated ethnonational contention, it did not (such as Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Kazakhstan).150 Comparison with the Yugoslav case, for example, would bring into focus a number of key differences. Consider just two of these by way of brief illustration. In the first place, the “stateness” problem, to which we referred in our discussion of the violence in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, was much more acute in the Yugoslav than in the Romanian transition; this was the consequence of Yugoslavia’s ethnofederal structure, which gave constituent ethnonationally defined Yugoslav republics “their own” territories and state structures and, in principle, the right to secede. Second, the vastly greater scale and significance of ethnonational atrocities during World War II in the Yugoslav case meant that narratives linking ethnonational violence in the past to threats of such violence in the present, crucial to the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, could not be effectively used to foment fear in Transylvania.151 149 Among the most important reasons for the lack of violence in Cluj is surely the lack of Hungarian-Romanian violence elsewhere in Transylvania (with the transitory and relatively minor exception of Taˆrgu-Mures¸). Where violence does occur in the context of an ethnic insurgency, it often comes from outside, or at least is strongly supported from outside, overwhelming local understandings of good neighborly relations, and drawing people into wider conflicts they had hoped to escape. This is the poignant theme, for example, of anthropologist Tone Bringa’s documentary film We Are All Neighbors. The film chronicles everyday life in a Bosnian village with a mixed Muslim and Croat population, as the war draws closer, finally forcing the Muslims to abandon the village, while their Croat neighbors stayed on. The title ironically invokes the local ideology of good neighborly relations, to which villagers give voice even as distant shelling is heard in the background. Clujeni sometimes voice similar understandings of good neighborly relations as a folk explanation for why ethnopolitical contention does not turn violent, or for why elite-level ethnic conflict does not spill over into everyday life. After watching a BBC documentary on Kosovo in 1998, for example—this was before the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, but after attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army and brutal reprisals by Serb security forces had increased ethnic tensions in everyday life—several people said they could not imagine anything similar happening in Cluj. While we do not wish to discount the importance of prevailing local understandings of civility, we are aware that such local understandings can be undermined by strong outside pressures, and we are not claiming that these understandings alone have immunized Cluj from the danger of ethnopolitical violence. 150 For an innovative methodological approach to the comparative study of civil wars, involving the randomized selection of cases in which civil wars did and did not occur for detailed narrative analysis as a complement to statistical analysis and formal modeling, see Fearon and Laitin, “Civil War Narratives.” 151 This comparison pertains to internecine violence among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia and between Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania; it does not include the deportation or murder of Jews. The atrocities committed by Hungarians against Romanians in 1940 and by Romanians against Hungarians in 1944 were by no means insignificant; but they differ by several orders of magnitude from those in Yugoslavia. On the way in which the memories of communal violence during World War II played into the violent conflict of the 1990s, see, for example, Hayden, “Recounting the Dead.”

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Taking Transylvania as the unit of analysis would also highlight the importance of exogenous factors. The lack of support from the Hungarian government for anything resembling armed insurgency by transborder coethnics and the lack of support from the central Romanian state for nationalist violence against Hungarians are particularly important in this respect.152 This lack of state support for violent nationalist projects, in turn, reflects the commitment of central state elites in both Hungary and Romania to processes of European integration—a commitment shared by all major parties in both countries.153 Ours is a case study of the workings of ethnicity, not a comparative study of the determinants of ethnonational violence. The disjuncture between intense elite-level ethnopolitical contention and popular indifference to that contention is a conspicuous feature of postcommunist Cluj, and one that we will explore further, in ethnographic perspective, in the second part of our study. Our ethnographic analyses may help explain the ways in which ordinary Clujeni distanced themselves from the swirl of nationalist claims and counterclaims that monopolized public debate for twelve years. But they are not narrowly tailored to explaining the lack of violence or popular mobilization; they are more broadly oriented to explaining how ethnicity works in a variety of everyday settings, practices, and institutions. It is to the analysis of everyday ethnicity that we now turn. 152 This glosses over all kinds of complexities and ambiguities that would have to be addressed in a full account. 153 For a brief account that emphasizes this international dimension, see Chirot, “What Provokes Ethnic Conflict?” On the significance of prospective NATO membership for RomanianHungarian relations, see Gallagher, “Danube Détente”; for a nuanced account of the interplay of internal and external developments, see Iordachi, “The Romanian-Hungarian Reconciliation Process.” More broadly, on the moderating effects of European integration on ethnopolitical contention in East Central Europe, see Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe. A full account of the lack of major ethnonational violence in Transylvania would have to analyze in detail the shifting relations of power and patterns of alliance within the political fields of Romania, Hungary, and the Hungarian minority in Transylvania; the relations between these three political fields (including, importantly, the role of the DAHR as a key player in coalition politics in Bucharest since 1996); and their embeddedness of ethnopolitical contention in ongoing processes of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. On a different plane of analysis, it could be argued that a relatively easy and attractive “exit” option—the possibility of emigrating to or working in Hungary—has undermined radical “voice,” to use the now-classic categories introduced by Hirschman in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, hindering the formation of a radicalized, violence-prone Transylvanian Hungarian minority elite.


In the first part of our book, we approached our subject from afar, and from above. This enabled us to establish the contexts and contours of nationalist politics. Contemporary nationalist politics has been decisively shaped by large-scale, long-term processes that can only be captured at a distance; and the central role of elites in nationalist politics is indisputable. Yet viewing nationalist politics from a distance, and from above, fosters a kind of optical illusion. National claims and counterclaims, easily “legible” from afar, stand out in bold relief; and the path of least resistance, for the analyst, is to take them at face value. Without intending to do so, it is all too easy to adopt the language of nationalists themselves: to report that “the Albanians” demand this, “the Kurds” that, “the Hungarians” something else.1 Yet it is an elementary observation, if one too often forgotten, that the beliefs, desires, hopes, and interests of ordinary people cannot be inferred from the nationalist (or other) utterances of politicians who claim to speak in their name. In the second part of the book, we draw much closer to our subject. We examine ethnicity and nationness as they are experienced and enacted—when they are experienced and enacted—in everyday life. In doing so, we heed Eric Hobsbawm’s dictum, quoted at the beginning of this study, that nationhood and nationalism, while constructed from above, “cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below.” The close examination of everyday social experience can supply an important corrective to the top-down view; it can keep us from uncritically equating the political centrality of nationalist rhetoric with the experiential centrality of nationness in the lives of ordinary people. The shift in angle of vision can help us understand why the nationalist rhetoric of politicians and publicists often falls on skeptical if not deaf ears. Yet Part Two is not intended simply—or even primarily—to complement and qualify the analysis of nationalist politics in Part One. The examination of the lived experience of ordinary Clujeni stakes out a domain of analysis in its own right: the domain of what we call “everyday 1

This point has been made forcefully by Handler, “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis.”

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ethnicity.”2 Even as we narrow the temporal and spatial focus of our study, we broaden its theoretical scope; we address basic questions about the nature, location, workings, and variable salience of ethnicity and nationness in everyday life.3 Our approach to ethnicity in Part Two is oblique rather than direct. One would not know from perusing the chapter titles that ethnicity was our central analytical interest. There are no chapters on ethnic identity or solidarity, or the formation of ethnic groups, or ethnic stereotyping and discrimination, or the ethnic division of labor, or ethnic myths, symbols, and traditions. This oblique expository strategy mirrors our research strategy of seeking to discover ethnicity in practice rather than imposing it on our material. We have sought to let ethnicity emerge, where relevant, but not to “insist it into relevance.”4 We have examined sites where ethnicity might—but need not—be at work; while analyzing ethnicity, we have remained attentive to “that which is not ethnic.”5 2 This is similar in some respects to what Michael Billig has called “banal nationalism” in his book by that name. Like Billig, we are concerned with the small and generally unnoticed ways in which ethnicity and nationness are reproduced from day to day. Yet there are also substantial differences. Billig is concerned with forms of nationalism that are inscribed within the powerfully naturalizing territorial and institutional frame of the modern nation-state; he does not consider forms of imagined ethnic or national community (like that of Transylvanian and other transborder Hungarians) that cut across state boundaries and therefore lack that state support. (On the distinction between state-framed and counterstate nationalisms, see Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 144ff.) Billig analyzes rhetoric and discourse; while we, too, analyze forms of everyday talk, we are also concerned with the everyday experience and interactional enactment of ethnicity, and with the institutional arrangements that shape the experience of ethnicity in everyday life. By emphasizing the pervasive—if often unnoticed—power of banal nationalism, moreover, Billig does not focus on the variable meaningfulness and salience of ethnic and national selfunderstandings; on his account, we are always national, if not always mindfully so. We are more interested here in the intermittency of ethnicity. 3 Mundane, everyday aspects of ethnicity and nationness have been discussed primarily by anthropologists, who have long been centrally interested in ethnicity (though less, until recently, in nationness), and whose disciplinary traditions leave them particularly well equipped to study everyday practices. The terrain of the everyday has also been richly explored by historians in the last two decades under the banner of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) and microhistory; although ethnicity per se has not been central to that work, everyday understandings of self and other, including ethnonational and ethnoracial selves and others, have been explored, notably in work on everyday life in Nazi Germany (for a review, see Eley, “Labor, History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte”; for programmatic statements, see the essays collected in Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life; in Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing; and in Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles). For work that is sensitive to everyday aspects of ethnicity and nationness, see from the large anthropological literature, Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity”; Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins; Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice”; Löfgren, “The Nationalization of Culture”; Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity; Eriksen, “Formal and Informal Nationalism”; Linde-Laursen, “The Nationalization of Trivialities”; and Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers. For an overview from a cultural studies perspective, see Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life; and Eley and Suny, “Introduction” in Becoming National, 21–22. For a sociological perspective, see Elias, “On the Concept of Everyday Life.” 4 We owe the expression to Emanuel Schegloff, personal communication. 5 Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, chapter 8. For a discussion of our data and research strategy, see appendix B, “A Note on Data.”

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We begin with six portraits of Clujeni and their families (chapter 5). The subjects of the portraits—a mix of Romanians and Hungarians, women and men, young and old—are representative of the various ways in which ethnicity and nationalism matter, or fail to matter, in the everyday lives of ordinary Clujeni; the portraits allow us to convey some of the flavor and texture of those lives. Most of these figures will reappear in later chapters. Ordinary Clujeni, like ordinary men and women throughout postcommunist Eastern Europe, are preoccupied with economic matters: most with getting by; the more ambitious or favorably situated, with getting ahead; and many, especially young people, with getting out. We explore these everyday preoccupations in chapter 6. In some settings, economic struggles are routinely framed in ethnic terms. This is not the case in Cluj, where everyday cares and concerns are only occasionally and intermittently interpreted in ethnic terms. This “negative” observation provides a corrective to the view from above, and from afar; it can help us avoid slipping in to what might, paradoxically, be called an “overethnicized” account of ethnicity. With these chapters as context, we turn to the question of how ethnicity works—a question that will occupy us throughout the second part of the book. Ethnicity is a perspective on the world, not a thing in the world. It is also a discursive resource that can be used for specific interactional purposes. In both forms, ethnicity operates in and through countless acts of categorization. Yet not all categorization is ethnic; ethnicity is always only one among many interpretive frames and discursive resources. Drawing on the close examination of recorded interaction, chapter 7 analyzes how ethnicity is accomplished interactionally in and through the deployment of categories. We are careful not to treat ethnic categorization in a vacuum, and we attend to the interactional interweaving of ethnic and nonethnic categories. Chapter 8 explores the ways in which language serves as a medium for the expression and enactment of ethnicity in everyday life. Language is generally understood to constitute ethnic nationality in Cluj, as throughout East Central Europe; and nationalist politics in Cluj, as in the wider region, are in large part about language. But we approach language here from a different angle. We are interested in the microinteractional significance of language in a setting in which Hungarians, but not (most) Romanians, are bilingual in Romanian and Hungarian. Language can of course function as a cue that signals ethnic membership. And while language is not a chronic site of ethnic friction in Cluj, some language practices can engender expressly or implicitly ethnicized complaints or even forms of language “policing.” We attend to the dynamics of codeswitching (between Hungarian and Romanian) in mixed settings, and to

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the mixing of words and expressions from one language into another. We analyze differences in everyday language ideologies. And we explore the feelings of comfort or discomfort that are often involved in speaking “one’s own” or another language in different types of situations. In most settings, speaking Hungarian is a marked practice in Cluj, while speaking Romanian—the “default” language—is unmarked. There is, however, a Hungarian “world” in Cluj, within which the linguistic signs are reversed, making Romanian the marked, and Hungarian the unmarked or default language. It is this world that we analyze in chapter 9. Ethnicity has no territorial base in Cluj; there are no Hungarian enclaves or predominantly Hungarian neighborhoods. Yet ethnicity has a strong institutional base: an extensive network of Hungarian schools (from preschool through university), supplemented by churches, cultural institutions, foundations, civic and recreational associations, a modest cluster of enterprises, and a flourishing Hungarian-language media. Outside this institutionalized sector, the reach of the Hungarian world is extended through networks of friends and acquaintances shaped in large part within schools and other Hungarian institutions. It is possible to buy groceries or second-hand clothes at stores where Hungarians are known to work, to frequent cafes, bars, or restaurants where the employees are Hungarian, to buy one’s (Hungarian) newspaper from a Hungarian vendor, or, through networks of personal referral, to find a Hungarian doctor, dentist, lawyer, tutor, painter, plumber, handyman, or auto mechanic. We considered the institutional core of the Hungarian world—the school system—as an object of nationalist struggles in Part One. Here we approach that world from the inside, examining how it is organized, how it is experienced, and how it is reproduced over time. The institutionalized Hungarian world is not fully encapsulated. Chapter 10 addresses interethnic interaction among friends, neighbors, workplace colleagues, and family members. Here, as throughout the second part of the book, we are concerned with lived experience. From this perspective, interethnic interaction depends not simply on the nominal ethnic identities of the participants, but on the meanings they attach to those identities. Much nominally interethnic interaction is not experientially interethnic, since the ethnicity of the parties is invisible or irrelevant to the interaction. Interethnic interaction within ethnically mixed marriages, for example, is an intermittent “happening,” a latent possibility that is actualized when the differing ethnic identities of the spouses become interactionally relevant. This can happen when a political discussion slips into an ethnicized argument; when a reference, playful or serious, is made to the ethnicity of a spouse; or when parents discuss

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what names to give their children, what schools they should attend, or which holidays to celebrate. Considering workplaces, neighborhoods, and other public sites as well as families, we discuss practices through which nominally mixed interactions become experientially mixed, including arguing in implicitly or explicitly ethnicized terms, avoiding ethnically “sensitive” issues, joking about such issues, and making choices between ethnically defined alternatives (such as those mixed families face when deciding what religion their children should be baptized in or what school they should attend). With the opening up to the outside world that followed the fall of Ceaus¸escu, Clujeni have been crossing international borders in large numbers as workers, traders, students, tourists, and emigrants. This has generated new sites for the experience of ethnic or ethnicized difference; we examine these in chapter 11. For migrants or travelers from Romania to Western European countries, the crossing of international frontiers often produces the experience of bearing a stigmatized or suspect official identity, inscribed, like it or not, in one’s passport. For ethnic Hungarian migrants from Transylvania to Hungary, nationality is problematized in another way. Most international migrations cross not only the territorial boundaries that demarcate states, but the imagined boundaries that enclose “nations” as well. Yet the migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary—their own putative “mother country”—does not. The experience of these migrants affords a particularly rich site for studying the contested meanings of nationhood from below, since Transylvanian Hungarians find themselves labeled derogatorily as “Romanians” in Hungary, and often respond by claiming for themselves a more authentic form of “Hungarianness.” Nationalist politics was our point of departure; chapter 12 brings us full circle. Here we approach politics from below, considering the ways in which ordinary people talk about politics. Our concern is not in the first instance with Hungarians’ and Romanians’ “opinions” about the controversial issues of nationalist politics—views that are often artifactually manufactured by survey research. We are concerned, rather, with the manner and modality, the style and stance, with which ordinary people engage political issues in everyday life, directly or obliquely, if only to turn them aside with a wisecrack, repeat a platitude, or summon up a hazy characterization of what a particular issue is “about.” In the conclusion, we seek to pull together the strands of the analysis by considering the wide range of forms and temporal registers in which nationhood and ethnicity are embodied and expressed. And in an epilogue, we reconsider the long-term process of nationalization and the correlative question of ethnic reproduction. Taking issue with uncritical

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celebrations of transnationalism, we note that nationalization continues in Cluj and elsewhere in Transylvania, and that the DAHR’s program of strengthening minority rights and building up a comprehensive parallel society cannot by itself ensure the reproduction of the Hungarian world over the long run.

Chapter 5




PORTRAITS

Mari and Family Like many Cluj Hungarians, Mari has lived almost her entire life in the town.1 She was born in Germany during World War II, where her parents, themselves from Cluj, were stationed. Her father remained in Germany after the war; Mari half-regrets that her mother did not do the same. It would be nearly a half-century before she would leave Romania again, and she would get no further than Hungary. Mari was raised in Cluj by her mother and grandmother, and attended Hungarian schools. She learned Romanian well only when she started working as a nurse in a local clinic, where she continued to work for nearly three decades. For the most part she has fond memories of the clinic. The rhythms of work allowed considerable time for conversation, and Mari enjoyed the sociability. Most of her colleagues were Romanian, and her relations with them were good, though not intimate. When speaking to her Hungarian colleagues, Mari felt comfortable speaking Hungarian; this did not generate frictions with her Romanian colleagues. Except at certain moments of political tension in the early 1990s, ethnicity was not a salient category at work. Mari’s husband was a journalist for the local Hungarian newspaper. Before the change of regime, she and her husband would socialize with her husband’s counterparts from the Romanian newspaper. But the sudden politicization of ethnicity in Cluj in the early 1990s, in which newspapers played a central role, put great strain on these long-standing social relationships. It was this that made Mari aware of the preceding “interethnic harmony.” Previously, she had not understood her experience in these terms; this was simply the way things were. Mari’s husband died a few years after the change of regime, and in the mid-1990s a minor medical problem obliged Mari, against her wishes, to take early retirement. A few years later, she began working as a nanny for a prominent local Hungarian family. But her life is centered in her home, a flat in the old city center, with book-lined walls and a large kitchen where Mari spends most of her time cooking, chatting with family and 1 When we describe or quote from ordinary Clujeni in this and other chapters, we have changed names and some potentially identifying details.

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friends, or watching movies on television (she has become a big fan of Bruce Willis). She regrets that her husband, who loved television, did not live to enjoy the broad international spectrum of programming now available by cable and satellite. Mari has two grown children, Zsuzsa and Zoli. Zsuzsa attended Hungarian schools and began to study economics at the university just after the fall of Ceaus¸escu. She was an ambitious student, and she completed her university studies in Budapest, where she went on to do a Ph.D. as well. She married a fellow Transylvanian Hungarian, who had also moved to Budapest to continue his studies, and they return regularly to Transylvania to visit family and friends. But their world has continued to expand. Zsuzsa lived in Copenhagen for a year on a fellowship, and she and her husband spent a year in Boston. In 2005 they moved to New York. Zoli has an entrepreneurial temperament and a more practical bent than his sister. Already in high school, he began to work fixing cars; since then he has worked for a bottling plant, an Italian toy manufacturer, and an electronics store. Zoli attended Hungarian schools, but his workplace colleagues have been primarily Romanian. This has shaped his personal life as well. His first serious girlfriend, whom he met in high school, was Hungarian; but his wife, Anca, whom he met at work, is Romanian. When Zsuzsa was living in Budapest, Mari and Zoli began to think of joining her. But then Zoli met Anca. Anca had grown up in a village east of Cluj and had come to the city in the late 1980s to attend high school; she had later studied accounting, without taking a degree, at one of the numerous private universities that sprang up in Cluj after the change of regime. She met Zoli when he applied for a job at the bottling plant where she worked; she was the one who hired him. A few months later, she moved in with him (and Mari: since very few young people can afford a place of their own, most young couples live with one partner’s parents). Soon they were planning their wedding. Zoli was no longer thinking seriously of moving to Hungary, since Anca spoke no Hungarian; and Mari was not interested in going on her own. Like other Cluj-born Hungarians of her generation, Mari experienced the transformation of Cluj from a midsized provincial town with a Hungarian atmosphere into a much larger industrial city with an increasingly pronounced Romanian character. And like many older Clujeni, Romanian as well as Hungarian, she is sometimes nostalgic for the Cluj of her youth, where the streets were cleaner, and the people more “civilized.” She reads the local Hungarian newspaper, shares certain Hungarian sensibilities with others of her generation, and occasionally

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regrets the disappearance of Hungarian as an everyday language of the streets and shops. But the transformation of the town does not weigh heavily on her. Her own family has contributed to that transformation: her daughter has emigrated; her son lives and works in a largely Romanian milieu; and Anca’s arrival has altered the language practices of her own home. Mari and Zoli had been comfortable speaking Romanian at work and in other public settings, but they had always spoken Hungarian with one another. It took a conscious effort on their part to switch to Romanian for Anca’s sake. When the three of them are together, Mari and Zoli sometimes unconsciously slip into Hungarian, though they soon catch themselves, and switch back to Romanian. When Zsuzsa and her husband return for a visit, they find it increasingly difficult to express themselves fluently in Romanian after living for so many years abroad, and the conversation is even more likely to gravitate to Hungarian. They make an effort, but it is not uncommon for side conversations—or the entire conversation—to revert to Hungarian, or for Hungarian words to be sprinkled into Romanian sentences.2 Anca, for her part, has indicated an interest in learning Hungarian; when Hungarian is spoken, she tries to follow the conversation, and she occasionally demonstrates her grasp of what is being said by contributing, in Romanian, a remark of her own. Mari is not combative by temperament, and she is not particularly interested in nationalist politics. But she retains a strong self-understanding as Hungarian. She recalled an incident from the early 1990s, when she was on the balcony of the interior courtyard in her apartment building, setting laundry out to dry. She was joined by her neighbor, a somewhat older Romanian woman who, like Mari, had spent most of her life in Cluj. As the neighbor hung out her laundry, she observed sardonically, in Hungarian (like many Romanians of her generation who had come to Cluj before the 1960s, the neighbor knew Hungarian), “I sure would like to see László To´´kés hanged.”3 Mari let the remark pass; but in relating the story several years later, she noted that she might have responded that she felt the same way about the mayor. When Hungary adopted legislation creating a formal legal status for transborder ethnic Hungarians, Mari was grateful “that Hungary finally wants to help the Hungarians in the neighboring countries.” But Zoli dismissed the legislation vehemently as an empty nationalist gesture.4 We consider issues of language choice and code-switching in chapter 8, pp. 251ff. To´´kés was the leader of the more radical wing of the DAHR (and well known also for his role in the December 1989 uprising that led to the fall of Ceaus¸escu). 4 See chapter 12, pp. 350ff. 2 3

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For Mari, the connection to Hungary retained a symbolic meaning for which Zoli had no appreciation at all.

Emilia Emilia is a retired schoolteacher in her late seventies. She continues to work as a tutor, helping students prepare for high-school and university entrance exams,5 and she is proud to be “fully booked” even at her age. This gives her a decent income and a busy schedule, both of which set her apart from the typical Cluj pensioner. She reads newspapers attentively, makes a point of being well informed about politics, and maintains an active social life. She has a strong sense of herself as an intellectual, as a Clujeanca, and as a Romanian. Emilia’s family name is a common Hungarian name, and during the time of our research it happened to be the name of a well-known Hungarian politician. This occasioned considerable teasing from her friends. Emilia would respond, somewhat defensively, that hers was a perfectly good Romanian name—one only had to look in the Bucharest phone book—provided that it was pronounced correctly, in the Romanian manner, with the accent on the second syllable, rather than in the Hungarian manner, with the accent on the first. Born in 1923, the youngest of seven children, Emilia grew up in an ethnically mixed village. Her parents started off poor, but her father worked as a clerk for the railway and managed to buy a modest farm twenty kilometers from Cluj. When Emilia was six or seven, she was sent to Cluj to attend school. Her parents arranged for her to board with a Hungarian family. Although this was a decade into the period of Romanian sovereignty, Cluj was then still a predominantly Hungarianspeaking town, and her father wanted Emilia to learn Hungarian. The first months were difficult, as the family did not speak Romanian, and Emilia spoke no Hungarian. But she picked up the language quickly, and she emphasizes that the experience served her well later in life. She has fond memories of the family, and even fonder memories of the other family she lodged with, wealthy Hungarian Jews who took her in so that their daughter could improve her Romanian. Emilia enrolled in an academic girls’ high school with the intention of going on to university. But the war interrupted her studies. When northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary in 1940, she took “the last train” to 5 Private tutoring is a common practice among teachers, substantially supplementing—often doubling or tripling—their official income. Parents believe that such tutoring greatly enhances their children’s chances of getting into the best schools or into university; even poor families often scrape together money for tutoring.

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the south, following her school to Sibiu. She vividly recalls the atmosphere of confusion in Cluj and her grief in leaving behind friends and classmates who were staying, especially her best friend, the Hungarian Jewish girl whose parents had taken Emilia as a lodger. (Like most Jews in northern Transylvania, the family was deported in 1944 and did not survive.) She also remembers being touched by the spectacle of so many Romanians fleeing the city as Hungarian authorities resumed control. Yet the arch-villains in her wartime stories are not the Hungarians, but the Russians, who arrived in 1944. Resentment and contempt pervade her descriptions of the Russian “hordes,” even her account of a Russian doctor whose skills, she reluctantly admits, may have saved her life. In contrast, the Hungarian soldiers were “just ordinary people,” who could not be blamed for doing their job. Emilia finished high school in Sibiu and returned to Cluj in 1944, when Romania regained northern Transylvania. She enrolled at the university (which had itself returned from its wartime “exile” in Sibiu), and studied Romanian language and literature. Her parents lost their farm to the collectivization of agriculture that began in 1949, and she has always held strongly anti-communist views. She is proud of the fact that she never belonged to the Communist Party, and that her colleagues and students addressed her not with the standard, politically correct “Comrade” but rather with the customary pre-communist “Madame,” which she interpreted as a token of respect. Emilia’s first job was in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, where she was assigned to teach Romanian in a Hungarian school. Although she was the only Romanian in the school, she felt welcome there. Taˆrgu-Mures¸ was then an overwhelmingly Hungarian town, and the students could not speak “a word of Romanian,” so her knowledge of Hungarian proved useful. She taught for a number of years in Taˆrgu-Mures¸; but in the late 1960s, after her divorce, she and her son returned to Cluj, where she felt she belonged. She found a teaching position in a nearby Romanian village, and worked there until she retired, living in town and commuting daily to work. Yet the town to which Emilia returned was no longer the Cluj of her youth (to which she refers nostalgically as “my Cluj”). Like many other Clujeni of her age and education, she is openly contemptuous of the t¸a˘ranii ora˘s¸enizat¸i (“citified” peasants) who came to Cluj by the tens of thousands in the 1960s and 1970s, acquiring—as she saw it—only the worst habits of urban life, while losing traditional peasant virtues and values. Emilia and other self-styled “old Clujeni” resented the newcomers’ uncouth behavior, their spitting, loud and coarse speech, and lack of urbanity. They were nothing like the genuine T¸a˘ranul Romaˆn (“Romanian Peasant”), a vanishing social type, whose hard-working nature and “common sense” she admires.

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Emilia speaks Hungarian well, like many Romanians of her generation, and takes pride in this fact. Yet her stories about how she learned Hungarian, or about her experience teaching in Taˆrgu-Mures¸, often lead her to contrast Romanians’ willingness to learn and speak Hungarian with Hungarians’ unwillingness (and sometimes inability) to speak Romanian; she would attribute the latter to Hungarians’ “disrespect” for the language.6 Emilia shares the widespread view that ethnic tensions “come from above.” Neighbors, she notes, get along fine and help one another without regard to nationality; given centuries of coexistence, she says, this is only natural. Yet while she disliked Mayor Funar and never voted for him, she believes that Hungarians have made excessive demands, and that Romanian nationalism is a legitimate defensive reaction to those demands. This explains why “we have problems only with the Hungarians, and with no other minority.” And unlike many “old Clujeni,” who were offended by Funar’s relentless exploitation of national symbols, Emilia saw nothing wrong with the liberal display of the Romanian flag, though she found it an “exaggeration,” even a “degradation,” to paint park benches and streetside posts in the national colors.

Karcsi and Ági Karcsi is a retired machinist, with the robust frame and combative temperament of the boxer he was in his youth. He lives in a small flat in an apartment block on the edge of town with his wife, Piroska, and their granddaughter, Ági, whom they have raised since she was an infant. Karcsi is a proud man, proud of his skilled knowledge of machine tools, proud of his Hungarianness, and proud of his willingness to stand up for his principles, using his fists if necessary. He likes to tell stories; when he gets going, it is hard to get a word in edgewise. He jumps out of his chair, jabs the air to make a point, and assumes the parts of the dramatis personae. Here is a typically combative story, relating an encounter in a bar in the days of the dictatorship: This guy comes over, in civilian clothes, elegant, and says in Romanian, he says “Is this seat taken?” and I say “It’s free.” He sits down, not two minutes pass, and he tells me I should speak Romanian at this table since he’s a Securitate officer. And I say to him, “First of all, you came to my table, you asked for permission to sit down, I didn’t go to your table, so I’m going to talk however I want.” 6 Many Romanian Clujeni of Emilia’s generation know Hungarian, especially those who grew up in Cluj. But today few young Romanians in Cluj know Hungarian.

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“Watch it,” he says, because he’s a Securitate officer. And then I say to him, “If you don’t leave right now,” I say, “I’m going to beat you into a pulp.” Then I grabbed him, picked him up, and then the waiter came, he was Romanian, and he says “What’s the problem, Karcsi?” he says to me in Romanian. I tell him, “I didn’t know that in this restaurant, at my table, where I was here first, you can tell people what language to speak.” Whatever its documentary value, this story exemplifies Karcsi’s selfpresentation as a regular guy in opposition to the “elegant,” pretentious intruder; as a Hungarian who was “here first”—not only at the table, as in this incident, but in the town; and as a man willing to stand up to authority figures. Born in 1934 in a small town north of Cluj, Karcsi has lived in Cluj since he was a young child. He attended a Hungarian elementary school, and then a Romanian-language vocational school (no Hungarianlanguage vocational schooling existed at the time). On his account, he left the vocational school (to avoid being expelled) after getting into a fight with a teacher, who had called him a “stinking Hungarian rascal” and would not let him play on the school handball team. Karcsi’s real education came on the job. During the years when heavy industry was expanding rapidly in Cluj, he worked at a number of the town’s major factories, developing a reputation—as he tells it—as one of the ablest and most sought-after machinists in town. He is proud of the specialized skills he acquired, and of the recognition and respect he earned from co-workers and managers. Intertwined with Karcsi’s self-understanding (and pride) as a skilled industrial craftsman is his self-understanding (and pride) as a Hungarian. He can reel off the dates when the town’s Hungarian churches and other monuments were built, and he scornfully dismisses the Romanian nationalist claim to prior settlement in Transylvania. “If you were here first,” he said, re-enacting an argument with a Romanian acquaintance, “then show me one, just one building here that the Romanians built two or three hundred years ago.” Like Mari and Emilia, Karcsi witnessed the transformation of Cluj from a commercial, educational, and administrative center with a Habsburg atmosphere and Hungarian majority to an industrialized and predominantly Romanian city nearly three times as large. But while Emilia interprets the changes in social terms, blaming uncouth peasants for destroying the urbane quality of the old Cluj, Karcsi sees them through an ethnic lens. In his eyes, the newcomers—drawn from the countryside to fill unskilled positions in factories, and to populate the new apartment block neighborhoods—were not simply peasants (as Emilia saw them)

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but Romanian peasants, while the urban traditions and standards of craftsmanship which (in his view) the newcomers failed to uphold were specifically Hungarian traditions. Mari lived through the same changes, and is sometimes nostalgic for the Cluj of her youth; but she has made her peace with the new Cluj. Not Karcsi. He takes every opportunity to set the historical record straight, justify Hungarian political aspirations, or defend Hungarian “honor” in the face of a perceived challenge. In story after story, he would illustrate—and re-enact—this pugnacious stance. When a Romanian man on a bus asked an elderly Hungarian man to speak Romanian, Karcsi explained to him that the old man was obviously from the Szekler area, then part of the Hungarian Autonomous Region, and had no way of learning Romanian; and when the Romanian persisted in his criticism, Karcsi allegedly picked him up by the collar and threw him off the bus. On another occasion, when a Romanian threatened to hang Karcsi by the red, white, and green (that is, “Hungarian”) necktie he was wearing, Karcsi told him to go hang himself. And when Karcsi overheard a Romanian colleague remark that he would like to see all the Hungarians drown in the Danube canal project, Karcsi responded with two jabs to the face and one to the gut. Karcsi relishes telling stories like this, and one might get the impression that he was always using his fists to defend his honor as a Hungarian. But of course even Karcsi is not “being Hungarian” all the time, and in fact he spends most afternoons playing speed-chess and kibitzing with a largely Romanian group in a park in the center of town. Nor was Karcsi thinking first and foremost as a Hungarian in raising his granddaughter. When Ági approached school age, a friend—a Hungarian friend, as Karcsi emphasizes—convinced him to enroll her in the Romanian section of the local school. “He says to me, ‘I’m a teacher,’ he says, ‘she’ll have no future,’ he says, ‘with a Hungarian school.’ ” She would have trouble, the friend argued, with the Romanian-language university entrance exam. Karcsi, who had not even completed vocational school, wanted better for Ági: “I saw kids at the factory, apprentices, welders, everything in all that dust there, and I said ‘God keep me from sending my own kid there.’ I shuddered, imagining my kid, there in the factory, suffering there—and so I said, better that she go to a Romanian school.” Today, now that one can take university entrance exams in Hungarian, study in Hungarian at the university in a number of fields, or attend university in Hungary, Karcsi has come to regret this decision. “If I would’ve known that the changes were going to take place, well, I would’ve sooner cut my tongue off than send her to a Romanian school. If I would’ve known . . .” Ági’s schooling has channeled her into a largely Romanian world,

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which makes Karcsi’s regret all the more keen. As if to absolve her grandfather of the responsibility for this outcome, Ági reported that even in preschool, though she was enrolled in the Hungarian section, she kept wandering over to the Romanian section. She could not even speak Romanian at the time, but the kids there seemed to be having more fun, singing and clapping their hands rather than endlessly “drawing lines” with a stodgy old teacher in the Hungarian section. In elementary school, Ági recalls, she was occasionally teased by her Hungarian playmates from the neighborhood, who called her a “Romanian,” and by her Romanian classmates, who made fun of her difficulties with the language, and said she belonged with the Hungarians. But she does not remember this as especially traumatic, and she soon became entirely comfortable in a Romanian milieu. Ági speaks Romanian with native fluency; she takes pride in her classmates’ comments that she has no accent. By high school her only significant Hungarian connection was with her family. Otherwise she inhabits a largely Romanian world. In this world, despite her Hungarian name, Ági is not defined by others, nor does she present herself, as a Hungarian. It is not that she is considered, or considers herself, ethnically Romanian; it is rather that ethnicity has lost most of its relevance to her life outside her family. The distinctions that structure Ági’s understanding and experience of her social world—in the sphere of friendship, study, and work—are those of class and status, not ethnicity. Unless prompted, she rarely mentions the ethnicity of her classmates or friends. On her account, it was her working-class family background, not her Hungarianness, that put her at a disadvantage in applying to an elite Romanian high school. “You have no business there, no matter how much you study, no matter how good you are,” she explained. She was in fact admitted on the basis of her good grades, but she remained very sensitive to the differences of family background that separated her from her more privileged classmates. After completing high school, Ági was admitted (on her second attempt) into law school, but only into the less desirable “correspondence” section. Here, too, the key distinctions are social, not ethnic: “You either have money or you don’t, that’s what counts.” Like her high school, the law school is full of children of the local elite. “They come with their parents’ cars, or they already have their own, and then they take out their cell phones and chatter away during class [ . . . ] just to show that they have money.” Even with a law degree, Ági felt, she would be disadvantaged by her modest background and lack of connections—though again, not by her ethnicity. To get a lucrative position (as a notary or solicitor, for example), one needs the right connections and a cash bribe far beyond the means of her family. In this context, with the most lucrative and presti-

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gious legal careers foreclosed, she expects to follow a more modest path. She is thinking of becoming a criminal investigator for the police or a perhaps a lawyer for the army. Most Hungarians consider the police and army to be exclusively Romanian institutions, in which a Hungarian would not even think of trying to make a career; but it did not occur to Ági that she might be disadvantaged by her Hungarian name. Karcsi and Ági could not be more dissimilar in temperament or outlook. Yet this was not a source of tension at home. Ági would listen with good-humored patience and indulgence to her grandfather’s stories; she would not argue with him or make fun of his nationalist bluster and working-class bravado. Karcsi, for his part, would not try to persuade her to be “more Hungarian.” Occasionally, he and his wife would gently correct Ági’s Hungarian or would supply the Hungarian word in place of a Romanian word Ági had used.7 And once we heard Karcsi bristle at Ági’s reference to “we Romanians,” even though the context made it clear that she was referring to all people living in Romania. “We are not Romanians, we’re Hungarians,” he had interjected.8 Yet despite his national pride and nationalist views, Karcsi’s main concern was that his granddaughter should enjoy chances in life that he had not enjoyed himself. It was more important to him that Ági get a good education and a good job than that she get a Hungarian education or a Hungarian job. Karcsi is enormously proud of Ági’s achievements, and that pride is only faintly tinged with regret that her schooling has led her outside the Hungarian world and into the wider Romanian one. For her part, Ági experiences this not as an ethnically alien world, but simply as the ordinary world of the country in which she lives.

Ana Mari, Emilia, and Karcsi all witnessed, and lamented, the dramatic changes that took place in Cluj in the 1960s and 1970s. Ana experienced the same transformation, but from a very different vantage point: as one of the many tens of thousands drawn to Cluj from the countryside in those years, she was part of the phenomenon that they lamented. Ana had grown up in a village about three hours west of Cluj, as the oldest of five children. She excelled in school, and, at a time when few village children had any secondary education, she was advised to continue her studies to become a teacher. So at age fourteen, she moved to Cluj to attend a pedagogical high school. 7 8

See chapter 8, pp. 260–61. See chapter 7, p. 214.

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As a child, Ana harbored a romanticized image of Cluj. When she arrived in the summer of 1962, the reality was more jarring, and she was initially disoriented by the rhythms of urban life. But she quickly came to like the city and decided she never wanted to live anywhere else. Ana was obliged to leave town after high school for her first teaching job, in a village in her home county. When she married a few years later, however, she was able to return. Her husband had likewise come to Cluj from a village to attend trade school, and he had remained in town to work in a local factory. Ana could not find work as a teacher, but she did get a job as a secretary in a factory. When their son Ca˘lin was born, Ana and her husband moved into an apartment in the new district of Ma˘na˘s¸tur, formerly a village adjacent to Cluj, where traditional peasant houses had been razed to make way for dense clusters of six- to ten-story apartment blocks. Many longtime residents of Cluj looked down on Ma˘na˘s¸tur as a magnet for transplanted peasants. But for Ana, and most other newcomers, Ma˘na˘s¸tur represented progress, with modern plumbing and other amenities. Ana remains enthusiastic about Cluj even today. She sees Clujeni as “better dressed, better-groomed, [and] more civilized” than residents of other towns. Yet forty years earlier, having just arrived in Cluj from a village, she would have been on the receiving end of this sort of comparison. She recalls with nostalgia the etiquette class at the pedagogical school in which “they taught you how to hold a fork and knife [properly], something my mother hadn’t taught me.” Ana was not oblivious to how she and other newcomers were perceived, but this generated a desire to assimilate to the “civilized” urban milieu rather than any kind of resentment. For Ana, the key step was securing a new job at the local art museum. “When I arrived at the museum and met my colleagues, [they] had degrees in the humanities and history—people of culture. I remember my first reactions in those first days, it was such a pleasure to hear a vocabulary—to be part of an atmosphere that was more select, more refined, something more appropriate for my aspirations.” Ana was concerned about her son fitting in as well. In his early years, Ca˘lin had spent much of his time with his grandparents in the village, a common practice when both parents were working. By the time he was ready for kindergarten, he had acquired the peasant manner of speech that Ana had long since lost. This was amusing to Ana, but she wanted to make sure her son attended “the best school in Cluj,” one with “a tradition, an old school, with a very good reputation.” Ca˘lin continued his education at one of Cluj’s elite high schools; he was studying law at the university during the period of our research. Like almost all Clujeni, Ana has been struggling economically since the change of regime, especially since she and her husband had divorced,

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leaving her with the responsibility for supporting her son. At one point, she thought of going abroad. One of her colleagues had emigrated to Spain by agreeing to care for an elderly gentleman. The colleague made preliminary arrangements for Ana to do the same, but in the end Ana decided she could not leave her son. Ana did not vote for Funar, but she gave him credit for repainting buildings in the city center and repairing the streets. Like Emilia, she found his nationalism understandable. “I am not a chauvinist,” she would say, but then she would go on to criticize Hungarians for wanting too much and always asking for more. To give in to their demands would place the country on a slippery slope that might lead ultimately to secession. She perceived Hungarians as arrogant and was offended by their superior airs. Once, as a friendly gesture toward her son’s elderly Hungarian neighbor, Ana had asked Ca˘lin to connect the neighbor’s television to cable so that she could watch the broadcast of the St. Stephen’s Day celebrations in Hungary. The neighbor had asked them in to watch the celebrations with her, but had offended them with her remarks about how only the Hungarians knew how to celebrate a national holiday so beautifully. Ana resented what she saw as Hungarians’ claims to cultural superiority. Ana’s experience of Cluj and her family narrative of social mobility were shaped by her rural-urban trajectory—a trajectory shared by countless other Clujeni of her generation, drawn to the town from villages during the years of heavy industrialization and rapid urbanization. Her story is remarkable mainly for its typicality.

Zsolt and Kati Zsolt and Kati are a thirtyish Hungarian couple. Both grew up in predominantly Hungarian towns; both had all their preuniversity schooling in Hungarian; and both came to Cluj in the early 1990s to attend university. Kati continued her studies in Hungarian literature at Babes¸-Bolyai University, while Zsolt studied electrical engineering at the Technical University (TU). Since graduating, Zsolt and Kati have worked in largely Hungarian milieux. Kati has worked for the Hungarian theater, a Hungarian cultural foundation, the department in which she studied at the university, and a local office of the Hungarian state that promotes investment in Romania. Zsolt and his brother started their own business, a small printing firm, drawing clients and business associates from a network of mostly Hungarian acquaintances. Unlike Karcsi and Ági, or Mari and Zoli, Zsolt and Kati inhabit a

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largely Hungarian world. This encapsulation requires little conscious effort on their part; it follows almost automatically from the dispositions, language skills, and networks of friends and acquaintances they acquired by growing up and studying in Hungarian environments. Zsolt and Kati met at a reception that marked the establishment of a new, foundation-sponsored literary periodical for young Transylvanian Hungarian poets and writers. Both attended the reception as a matter of course: Kati because of her work in the Hungarian nonprofit cultural sector, Zsolt because his firm was engaged to print the new periodical. Neither made an effort to seek out a Hungarian partner; they came together “naturally,” since their positions within Hungarian institutions and networks exposed them primarily to other Hungarians. A year later they were married.9 Growing up in an overwhelmingly Hungarian town in the Szekler region, and attending Hungarian schools as a matter of course, Zsolt did not speak Romanian well. Romanian was a foreign language for him, a language studied in school but otherwise seldom used. When Zsolt was applying to the university, it was not possible to study electrical engineering in Hungarian. Yet while Zsolt could not study in Hungarian, he could at least be around other Hungarians: “From Csíkszereda [Miercurea-Ciuc, Zsolt’s home town], Cluj is the only place you can go for university. Bucharest would have been a lot closer, but there was no Hungarian university, and no Hungarian community.” Bucharest was generally considered to have the best university in Romania; and in the early 1990s, ambitious students and young professionals from all over the country flocked to the capital. Yet studying in Bucharest was out of the question for Zsolt, as it was for the vast majority of Transylvanian Hungarians.10 Moving to Cluj was traumatic enough for Zsolt. He found himself in a town—and in a university environment—in which Hungarians were a minority and Romanian was the prevailing language. Discovering that he had been assigned to a dorm room with five Romanian students, he decided instead to look for an apartment with some Hungarian acquaintances. Shy by temperament, and acutely aware of the weakness of his Romanian, Zsolt felt uncomfortable—and uncomfortably Hungarian. Speaking Hungarian—or speaking Romanian with an obviously Hungarian accent—made him feel he stood out; “it was as if I had been 9 We explore the way in which ethnic networks that develop within schools and other institutions shape social relations in chapter 9. 10 Most Transylvanian Romanians, too, would not even consider studying in Bucharest; apart from questions of proximity and cost, an antipathy to the capital is quite common among Transylvanian Romanians. We return to this issue—and to the overlap and interplay between regional and ethnonational self-identification—in chapter 7, pp. 232ff.

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black,” he recalled. He did not mean that he was the target of discrimination; he meant that he felt conspicuous. He emphasized that his Romanian classmates were “unbelievably nice,” and he was grateful for the patience and understanding they displayed as he struggled to express himself in Romanian. But he assumed from the beginning—in a selffulfilling manner—that he had little in common with them. In this unfamiliar and alienating setting, Zsolt sought out the familiar; and the familiar was Hungarian. Without consciously adopting a Hungarian nationalist stance, Zsolt was led to reconstruct in Cluj a Hungarian world like the one he had left behind in Miercurea-Ciuc. Today, his friends, acquaintances, and business associates in Cluj are overwhelmingly Hungarian. He can even buy his bread, get his car fixed, and have his business’s accounting done in Hungarian. While Zsolt built up a largely Hungarian network of friends and acquaintances outside of Cluj’s Hungarian institutions, Kati could draw on a ready-made set of contacts within those institutions. Studying in Hungarian at the university, in a field explicitly concerned with Hungarian culture, connected her to nationally minded Hungarian classmates and teachers; these contacts shaped her subsequent trajectory, leading to her first three jobs after graduating. These jobs kept her within an institutionally structured Hungarian world, a world of “professional Hungarians” devoted to reproducing Hungarian national culture in Transylvania.11 Yet even when she ventures outside Hungarian institutions and beyond the networks they generate, Kati’s inclination is to remain within the Hungarian world. Once, between jobs, as she reported in a matterof-fact manner, she “obviously” looked first and foremost at the employment listings in the local Hungarian newspaper. The more insulated Zsolt and Kati became in this Hungarian world, the more alienating—and the more “Romanian”—they found the wider world. For Zsolt, in particular, this pivots on language. He claims not to be comfortable speaking Romanian. (Kati sometimes says the same thing about her spoken Romanian, though she has translated books from Romanian into Hungarian, an accomplishment in which she takes pride.) Zsolt and Kati sometimes avoid places and situations that would require them to speak Romanian at length. They sometimes avoid mixed excursions or other mixed gatherings, for if even one Romanian friend or spouse who does not know Hungarian joins a group of several other Hungarians, politeness dictates that all should speak Romanian.12 Once, for example, they reported declining an invitation to a party (to which 11 On the analogous notion of “professional Romanians” as minorities in historically Hungarian-dominated Transylvanian towns, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 153, 298. 12 This does not mean that Hungarians do in fact consistently speak Romanian on such occasions. On the sociolinguistic dynamics of mixed company, and the frictions to which this can give rise, see chapter 8, pp. 251ff.

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Hungarians and Romanians were invited) on the grounds that they just were not up for an evening of speaking Romanian. (Like most people, though, they are not entirely consistent; a few months later, they enjoyed spending New Year’s Eve in mixed company at a party organized by a Romanian sociologist.) There is also at times a more visceral dimension to the ways they distance themselves from Romanians. On one particularly unpleasant train trip, it was not just the filthy conditions that bothered Kati and Zsolt; it was the fact that the other passengers, Romanians from the southern part of the country, did not seem to be bothered. Something like this, Zsolt said, could never happen in a “civilized country.” After this trip, they decided they just had to buy a car, because they could not stand traveling in such conditions. There are limits to their ethnonational encapsulation, of course. The Hungarian world in Cluj is not as comprehensive, or as insulated, as that of the Szekler town in which Zsolt grew up. They speak Romanian every day, at least in fleeting encounters. And they do not always seek to remain within the confines of the Hungarian world. Zsolt and Kati may do their local grocery shopping at a “Hungarian” store instead of the equally close, and somewhat less expensive, “Romanian” store in their neighborhood, since they find the service better and the staff friendlier. But now that they have a car, they prefer to stock up on food and other items at Metro, a recently opened German-run warehouse-style store on the outskirts of town. Metro, too, insulates them from distasteful aspects of life in Romania, but it takes them outside of the Hungarian world into the non-national world of international consumer modernity. They see Metro—clean, reliable, efficient, hygienic—as a “civilized” oasis; the fact that they have to speak Romanian there does not matter. Zsolt and Kati vote for the DAHR, like almost all Hungarians, but they are harshly critical of the party. Like most Clujeni, they see politics as a shabby affair that lines the pockets of politicians while doing little for ordinary people. At the same time, they do support the DAHR program, including the demand for autonomy and for a separate Hungarian university. Like most young Clujeni, Hungarian and Romanian, Zsolt and Kati have thought about emigrating. Kati has a brother who lives in Chicago, but Zsolt cannot imagine living in the United States, so they have not considered moving there. Instead, they have thought about moving to Hungary. During the early 1990s, when many Transylvanian Hungarians resettled in Hungary, and many others spent a good deal of time there, it was hard not to think about the possibility of studying or working in Hungary or resettling there. Zsolt and Kati were not strongly tempted by the prospect of moving, however, until the summer of 2001, when they reported that they had decided to emigrate. Kati’s job

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promoting Hungarian investment and tourism in Romania generated contacts with business circles in Hungary that she thought would lead to a good job offer; and Zsolt believed that his experience, skills, and capital would enable him to start up a printing business in Hungary. They also said they were fed up with life in Romania. Yet emigration is seldom a simple affair. Like Mari and Zoli, Zsolt and Kati were only interested in moving to Hungary if they could get good jobs. They had no desire to be looked down upon as “Romanians” by Hungarians there.13 In the meantime, their plans have taken a new turn. Kati’s connections in Hungary did pay off, but in an unanticipated way. She found a new job, but one that will keep her in Romania as the representative of a well-known London-based advertising agency. For his part, Zsolt is content to stay in Cluj, confident that his business will be able to attract clients in Hungary through the Internet. For the time being, at least, they plan to remain in Cluj.

Claudiu and Lucian Claudiu and Lucian are brothers in their mid-twenties. They belong to the first post-Ceaus¸escu generation (Claudiu was twelve, Lucian ten, at the change of regime). They grew up in a small town in the northwest of Transylvania. Claudiu came to Cluj in the mid-1990s for high school; he continued his studies at the TU, where Lucian later joined him. Both are now working for a local programming firm (owned and operated by a Romanian return migrant from the United States). The brothers inhabit a Romanian world. But it is not Romanian in the same way that the world of Zsolt and Kati is Hungarian. For Claudiu and Lucian, as for most Romanians, the “Romanianness” of their world is utterly taken for granted; it is rarely a matter of conscious awareness. Zsolt and Kati often assume Romanians have the same sort of ethnonational self-awareness that marks their experience as Hungarians. But Claudiu and Lucian do not see themselves or experience their social world this way. When we first met them, Claudiu and Lucian were students with shoulder-length hair, preoccupied with computers, music, sports, beer, traveling, and gagici (“chicks”). They spent little time studying and would often cut classes to join their friends in the Music Pub, a favorite student haunt where the beer was cheap and the music to their liking. As die-hard “rockers,”14 they scorned the more popular dance and disco music and See chapter 11, pp. 326ff. Claudiu and Lucian, like other young Clujeni, Romanian and Hungarian, use the English word, indicating their orientation not only to a form of music but to an associated style of life. 13 14

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patronized bars where they could hear Janis Joplin, AC/DC, or Iris (a veteran Romanian rock band); they favored jeans and T-shirts over the dressier look of those who listened to dance music. They and their friends pooled money to buy beer and cigarettes; food was decidedly secondary. Proud of their ability to travel on a shoestring budget, they hitchhiked all over Romania, attending music festivals, checking out the bars, sleeping in tents or on the floors of friends’ flats. As students, Claudiu and Lucian lived in a cramped and dingy dorm room with two or three other roommates, scraping by with money and the occasional care package sent by their parents. Their room was strewn with dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays, a half-eaten loaf of bread on the windowsill—and three late-model computers. Unlike other students, TU students frequently had their own computers. And the TU dorms were hard-wired to the Internet, a rarity in a town where few people had even dial-up access in the late 1990s. The connection frequently faltered, but when it worked, the students took full advantage of it, mainly to download music. They all had thousands of MP3 files; they spent hours searching for new music, trading files, and playing disc jockey at their frequent parties. Like other TU students, Claudiu and Lucian also thought of computers as a business opportunity. They considered investing in a CD burner in order to create and copy CDs, and they talked about setting up a web-design business, though they never got beyond designing a home page. Like many other TU students, Claudiu and Lucian were oriented to “the West.” Students frequently boasted that 90 percent of TU graduates got jobs abroad. Canada was a preferred destination; Canadian visas were reportedly relatively easy to obtain. Claudiu and Lucian, like other students, talked not of emigrating but of working for a few years abroad, and then returning to start their own businesses. They often talked about who had gone abroad, or who was thinking about going. They leafed through the local papers, scanning the advertisements for positions abroad, with their seductive salaries. Claudiu insisted that if he could not make $1,000 a month in Romania (an impossibly high salary in Cluj), he would work abroad. He did not care where, though he had heard from a student who had landed a job in Ireland that the beer was terrific. Since graduating, Claudiu and Lucian have had to make do with the $150 a month they earn at the local programming firm. It took some time to get used to the long hours, which kept them from frequenting the bars. And they complain that the work is boring. Yet unlike many Clujeni, young and old, they are not particularly anxious about the future. They are confident that their skills will be in demand in Romania and abroad. Claudiu and Lucian are neither interested in nor well informed about politics, though their father is a local political official in their home

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town. They are even less interested in nationalist politics. Ethnicity is largely invisible in their world. Claudiu once remarked that, after more than a year, he suddenly realized that one of his friends from the Music Pub, a favorite hangout, was Hungarian. The friend’s name was Sanyi (or, in its Romanianized variant, “S¸oni”), a name others might have immediately recognized as Hungarian. To be sure, Sanyi/S¸oni spoke unaccented Romanian and hung out in a Romanian-speaking milieu. But even Lucian gently poked fun at his brother’s obliviousness: “After a year, it occurs to him that the guy might be Hungarian,” he said, laughing. Ethnicity was simply irrelevant to their interactions at the Music Pub; what mattered were music and beer. Another favorite haunt for Claudiu and Lucian in their student days was Roadhouse, a disco that catered to their rock’n’roll tastes. Every Thursday evening the basement of the student union in Cluj was jammed with sweating, long-haired students in casual “rocker” attire, the air thick with cigarette smoke. Roadhouse was organized by a Hungarian DJ from Taˆrgu-Mures¸; the crowd was predominantly Hungarian; and songs were announced in Hungarian. (Many of the songs themselves were in Hungarian, though some were in Romanian, and most were in English.) Hungarian students in Cluj often saw Roadhouse as a specifically Hungarian disco. But Claudiu and Lucian did not: for them, it was simply the disco that played the best music in town, to which one could dance all night. Of course they noticed that Hungarian was spoken. “They sometimes ask for cigarettes in Hungarian,” Lucian remarked, without attaching any particular importance to this. If he understood the request, he would offer a cigarette; if not, he would say Poftim? (“Excuse me?”), and the request would be repeated in Romanian. Claudiu’s girlfriend, Livia, was sensitive to ethnicity in a way Claudiu and Lucian were not. Before connecting with Claudiu, Livia had had two or three Hungarian boyfriends at the university (one of whom she had met at Roadhouse). Her stories about them never failed to irritate Claudiu, not because of the ethnicity of her ex-boyfriends, but because of the frequency with which they came up in conversation. But Livia enjoyed teasing Claudiu in this way, just as she enjoyed deploying her scraps of Hungarian at Roadhouse. Guys would come up to her and ask her to dance in Hungarian, to which she would reply affirmatively in Hungarian, only to confess once on the dance floor—again in Hungarian—that she was Romanian, and did not speak Hungarian. For Claudiu and Lucian, however, ethnicity barely registers at all. In this, they resemble most Romanian Clujeni, who go about their daily business largely oblivious to the ethnic distinctions that are so important to Karcsi or Zsolt and Kati.

Chapter 6




PREOCCUPATIONS

The portraits we sketched in the preceding chapter focused selectively on ethnicity. Our aim was to show how ethnicity matters—and to note when it does not—in the lives of ordinary Clujeni. We described ethnic and national self-understandings, language repertoires and practices, the ethnic composition of families and friendship networks, language of schooling, political views, and so on. Even in characterizing those for whom ethnicity is virtually invisible—Claudiu and Lucian, for example— we highlighted ethnicity, if only to emphasize its absence. This selective focus is hardly surprising in a book about ethnicity and nationalism. But it can be misleading. Most studies of ethnicity and nationalism have lifted these phenomena out of the everyday contexts in which they are embedded. They have done so by focusing on ethnically or nationally marked places, times, institutions, or practices; by giving special attention to activists, journalists, teachers, and others who are culturally equipped and politically inclined to articulate and communicate understandings of ethnicity and nationhood; or simply by communicating the researcher’s interest in ethnicity to the people she studies, thereby inviting them to talk selectively about matters ethnic. Throughout the second part of our book, we seek to resituate ethnicity and nationness in their everyday contexts. We do so in this chapter by initially characterizing the problems, predicaments, and preoccupations of ordinary Clujeni without specific reference to ethnicity, and only subsequently asking in what ways and to what extent these preoccupations are experienced and interpreted in ethnic terms. To anticipate our results, we find that ordinary cares and concerns—above all, concerns with getting by, or getting ahead, in difficult and rapidly changing economic circumstances—are only occasionally interpreted in ethnic terms. Everyday problems and predicaments, and the strategies that address them, are for the most part articulated in other idioms, and seen through other lenses.

Getting By Gyuri Molnár drives a taxi. This is not an easy job in Cluj. Roads are bad, especially in outlying neighborhoods; gas is expensive; and compe-

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tition is tough, for the town boasts an astonishingly large taxi fleet, with a half-dozen big firms. The large number of taxis testifies on the one hand to the existence of a moderately prosperous stratum, able to afford fares that, although extremely low by Western standards, are high in relation to the average salary (about $100 a month in the late 1990s). But the large taxi fleet testifies also to the poverty of the town. Many drivers were pushed into the business after losing their jobs in the collapsing industrial sector, or by the need to scrape together some additional cash to supplement their meager salaries. Gyuri would rather not be driving a taxi at all. Like many other Clujeni, he bought his car in the early 1990s, at the high point of the Caritas affair. This was a notorious—and for more than a year spectacularly successful—pyramid scheme that not only promised but paid investors an eightfold return every three months.1 Gyuri and his wife, Andreea, a librarian, got in early, overcoming their reservations by initially investing only a small sum. Like other early entrants, they did well, and managed to complete two or three cycles before the collapse. In addition to the car, they bought two color TVs, a new refrigerator, and other amenities. They even stopped working for a year. “How well we lived then!” Andreea mused wistfully when we first met them in 1995, a year and a half after the bust. When the Caritas bubble burst, they lost the last and largest chunk of money they had invested, and their life of relative luxury came to an abrupt end. Gyuri converted his car into a taxi, and Andreea went back to teaching school. Even with two jobs, they found themselves struggling to make ends meet for themselves and their three children, the older two from Andreea’s previous marriage. From year to year, the gap between declining real wages and soaring prices seemed to grow wider, and the promised light at the end of the long postcommunist tunnel that politicians optimistically called a “transition” grew ever more faint. The following conversation, from the summer of 1997, illustrates the texture of their cares and concerns: Andreea: It’s just so hard. I leave home with 100,000 lei [about $14]2 and I hardly buy anything, food for two or three days. I’m fed up with it all. It didn’t bother me so much two years ago [when we had last seen them]. [...] Veronika: [Andreea’s 17-year-old daughter] It’s not so bad. What’s so bad about it? 1 See Magyari-Vincze and Feischmidt, “A Caritas és a romániai átmenet”; Verdery, “Faith, Hope and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids.” 2 At this time, one dollar was worth about 7,000 lei.

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Andreea: You don’t notice it [literally: You don’t feel it], they [turning away from Veronika, referring to her kids] don’t feel it, because I’m the one who has to put food on the table every day, morning, noon, and night, and maybe some fruit, everything, and clothes and all that. They don’t know how it is, of course they don’t, because I don’t want them to. I’m the only one who knows how hard it is. [Referring to Gyuri] He doesn’t know either, he just brings home the money. Gyuri: Well, I work from dawn to dusk. [...] Andreea: He gives me 50,000 lei, maybe 60,000, and the next day I don’t have a single leu left, even though I hardly bought anything. The day before yesterday he gave me 90,000 lei, and I just don’t know, if I write down everything I bought, it’s nothing. I bought two dozen eggs, for example, and some meat, then a few peppers, I bought margarine, some bread, I don’t even know what I bought. And I have about 20,000 lei left, but I can’t buy anything with that . . . [...] Andreea: And then there’s the bloc expenses [monthly apartment building maintenance fees], that’s 150,000 lei, then as a teacher my salary is 400,000. [ . . . ] Up until now the telephone was 30,000, but I don’t know, they just raised the prices for that too. Then there’s the cable, that’s another 20,000, then milk, because we get milk delivered, there’s another 60,000 lei. Then the electricity bill—what else do we have to pay? It’s almost 400,000. So what do we live off? [...] Gyuri: Since you were here last it’s gotten much worse. When you were here last, a pack of Carpat¸i [the cheapest, lowest-status, filterless cigarettes] cost 250 lei [12 cents at the time]. . . . Now they are 2,000 lei [28 cents]. So there’s your difference. Bread was 400 lei . . . Andreea: And how much was a salary then? Mine was 200,000 [then $98 per month], now it’s 400 [$56]. So salaries didn’t go up like [prices]. Gyuri: Salaries don’t go up . . . [...] Andreea: I dunno. I don’t understand what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter that there’s a new government, it doesn’t matter that Constantinescu’s president, because what does the simple person have to say? I just don’t care who’s in power, I just want a better world. It doesn’t matter that there’s a new government,

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because really, before there were communists, but my life is no better at all. So what if I can speak freely now? Better not to speak, but at least have some money to live off. Really. [...] Gyuri: God forbid that someone should get sick. Andreea: Oh no, I don’t even want to think about that. [...] Gyuri: And if we have to buy clothes, we buy used clothes, “second” [in English]. [...] Andreea: A pair of shoes costs 200,000—how could we afford that? Gyuri: And that’s not for anything fancy. Veronika: A pair of jeans . . . Andreea: Oh, don’t even start with the jeans, what young people wear. Out of the question. Matei: [Andreea’s twenty-year-old son] Jeans from Turkey, not the original ones. Real ones, like Levi’s, are 500,000 lei, a month’s salary. Gyuri: Levi Strauss, right. How could you afford that? OK, those are just dreams. Andreea: But they’re not dreams, we have to buy clothes. Gyuri: Fine, they have certain expectations, because they’re young. Matei: A decent pair of Adidas is a million lei. Gyuri: But . . . there are people who . . . if you earn your living honestly, you can barely get by. Andreea: You can’t do it if you earn an honest living, only those who steal can. [...] Gyuri: Right, if you earn an honest living, you can only just get by. Andreea: [ . . . ] I don’t even know how they do it, because there are these millionaires and billionaires.3 They just steal. [...] Gyuri: They don’t pay taxes, or they don’t report their earnings, it’s the kind of thing we don’t know about. Because for example I drive a taxi, and all I can say is that if I rip someone off, then they’re not going to get in my cab again. That’s the way it is. I have a meter, I have to turn it on, and they pay whatever it shows. If I don’t turn it on, then . . . Andreea: And there’s another thing: to rip off some poor guy, you can’t do that either, because he’s poor too. [ . . . ] The rich don’t take taxis anyway. Rich people, they have cars. 3

Millionaires and billionaires in Romanian currency.

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Gyuri: [ . . . ] It’s the young who take taxis, and Arabs, because . . . Andreea: I wouldn’t have the heart to rip off a poor person. It’s better to live like this than to steal. At least I can live at peace with myself. Gyuri: We earn our money the honest way. We live off whatever we earn. Veronika: We live pretty normally, don’t we? Andreea: Sure, normally, it’s just really hard. This conversation was occasioned by the presence of Brubaker and Fox, and some aspects of the discussion—notably the explicit spelling out of certain things that would otherwise go without saying—were evidently produced for our benefit, in order to bring us up to date and fill us in on how things had developed since our previous visit. Yet while the particular content of the Molnárs’ complaints was tailored to our presence, the complaining itself was not. Complaining—often in standardized, even ritualized form—is an important social activity in its own right.4 And complaining about the difficulties of getting by is a central vernacular practice in Cluj.5 It is a recurrent feature of routine interaction among friends, neighbors, workplace colleagues, and family members. Such talk both reflects and reinforces the preoccupation with everyday economic difficulties that forms the backdrop of everyday life for most Clujeni. The energies and attentions of the Molnárs, like those of most Clujeni, are consumed by a series of small struggles to eke out a respectable standard of living, and to plan ahead for themselves and their children, in the face of declining real wages, soaring prices, worthless pensions, increasing unemployment, devalued diplomas, curtailed social services, muddled property relations, crumbling public infrastructures, and a deeply uncertain future. The Molnárs are by no means destitute. Thanks to their initial success in Caritas, they enjoy material goods today that they did not under Ceaus¸escu. Tellingly, they talk not only about the price of milk, eggs, bread, cheap cigarettes, used clothes, and gasoline, but also about cable television, blue jeans, and Adidas, if only to note that “original” Levis and “proper” Adidas, at the price of an average monthly wage, are hopelessly beyond their reach. They seek to live “normally”—and at least from the point of view of their daughter Veronika, then seventeen, they succeed.6 But their “success,” such as it is, comes at a cost: like 4 On ritualized “litanies and lamentations” as a central discursive genre in the context of perestroika in Russia, see Ries, Russian Talk, chapter 3. 5 Sometimes it seems as if people talk about little else. Talking with two friends about the difficulties of getting by, a pensioner in her late sixties became exasperated, and interjected: “Enough about this! Let’s change the subject!” But in less than a minute they were back on the old topic, complaining once again. “So it’s come to this,” she observed, the resignation in her voice suggesting that it was no use seeking to divert the conversation from its “natural” course. 6 On the way in which understandings of “normality” after socialism have been linked to the consumption of Western goods, see Rausing, “Reconstructing the ‘Normal.’ ”

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most Clujeni, they work harder, and feel more harried, than they did before the change of regime. The Molnárs do not frame their preoccupation with getting by in ethnic terms.7 Instead of ethnicity, other ways of seeing, involving other social categories, other principles of vision and division, are at work. Gender is one: Andreea observes that Gyuri, who merely “brings [home] the money”—and an inadequate sum at that—does not know how hard things are, since he does not face the daily task of trying to stretch the meager income to cover routine needs.8 Generation is another: the children are not aware how hard things are, since Andreea tries to shield them from that knowledge. Generation also figures in another sense, when Gyuri remarks that the young have certain “expectations” about clothes. Categories of wealth figure centrally, and are linked to moral categories. The honest worker can barely survive, while only “those who steal”—indeed only those who steal on a grand scale—get rich. A final powerful “we-they” contrast is between the government—referred to simply with the distancing “they”—and ordinary people. This non-ethnic framing of daily preoccupations stands in contrast to the ethnicization of some other matters in the Molnár household. We introduced the Molnárs by their occupations, and preoccupations, deliberately saying nothing about ethnicity. But we could just as well have used an ethnic frame of reference to characterize the family, as we did to characterize representative Clujeni in the preceding chapter. We could have introduced Gyuri as a Hungarian, rather than as a taxi driver. After all, Gyuri identifies himself as a Hungarian in many contexts, and takes pride in that identity. He was educated in Hungarian schools, has worked in Hungary, and reads the local Hungarian newspaper. His wife, Andreea, is of mixed Romanian and Hungarian descent, and speaks both languages.9 But she considers herself Romanian, all the more so when her husband adopts a “Hungarian” stance. Domestic frictions are readily ethnicized; talk about politics, in particular, can quickly generate ethnically polarized representations of the issues—and of one another.10 7 The only mention of ethnicity is a passing reference to “Arabs.” Many students came to Romania during the Ceaus¸escu years from the Middle East and Africa. Those from the Middle East were generally perceived as being better off than most Romanians. Some stayed on after completing their studies; many of these run small businesses. 8 On the reconfiguration of gender relations in postsocialist East Central Europe, see Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism, and the essays collected in idem, eds., Reproducing Gender. 9 Gyuri and Andreea speak both Romanian and Hungarian with one another, often switching unselfconsciously between languages. The conversation reproduced above, with the exception of one Romanian phrase, took place in Hungarian, for at that early point in our research, Brubaker and Fox spoke Hungarian much better than Romanian. 10 We consider this dynamic—and the manner in which nominally mixed relationships come to be experienced as mixed—in chapter 10.

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Characterization has consequences. If we had introduced the Molnárs in ethnic terms, we would have introduced at the same time a set of expectations about the centrality and salience of ethnicity in their everyday experience. And ethnicity is more salient for Gyuri and Andreea, given the way it can be used to frame political arguments and marital frictions, than it is for most Clujeni. Yet what is remarkable—and what requires emphasis, precisely in a book about ethnicity—is that even for the Molnárs, as for the great majority of fellow Clujeni, everyday preoccupations are not generally experienced or expressed in ethnic terms. Even in a setting in which political talk is pervasively informed by nationalist rhetoric, the everyday cares, concerns, and preoccupations of ordinary people, as Hobsbawm cautioned, “are not necessarily national and still less nationalist.” There are exceptions, of course, and we consider them below; but it is important to bear in mind that they are exceptions.

Everyday Coping Strategies In the uncertain and unsettling circumstances of protracted economic transformation, Clujeni, like others throughout the region, deploy a number of characteristic strategies for getting by.11 In the communist “economy of shortage,”12 coping strategies—besides the endless queuing— revolved around pile (pronounced PEE-leh), a Romanian term adopted by Transylvanian Hungarians as well, and meaning roughly the “use of personal networks and informal contacts to obtain goods and services in short supply and to find a way around formal procedures.”13 Pile remains important today. Trebuie sa˘ ai pile—“You’ve got to have connections”—is a universally acknowledged formula for finding most jobs. Yet connections increasingly need to be supplemented by cash. Where pile and a well-chosen gift might have sufficed in the past— to get a job, for example, or to have a medical procedure performed—a 11 On everyday life and strategies for getting by after socialism elsewhere in the region, see Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life; see also the essays collected in Mandel and Humphrey, eds., Markets and Moralities and Hann, ed., Postsocialism. 12 Verdery, What Was Socialism. 13 This is actually a definition of the corresponding Russian term blat, from an anthropological study of the “economy of favors” in Russia (Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors, 1), but it captures quite accurately the meaning of pile as well. So central was the phenomenon under communism that the initials of the Romanian Communist Party—PCR—were jokingly held to stand for pile, cunos¸tint¸e, relat¸ii, more or less interchangeable terms for connections, acquaintances, and relations. On the centrality of such informal networks in communist Romania, see for example Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 38–40, 272n63; and Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism, 68–69. On the equivalent in Poland, see Wedel, The Private Poland, esp. chapter 2; on East Germany, see Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 114–22; on China, see Yang, Gifts, Favors and Banquets.

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hefty cash bribe might now be required.14 There is a widespread sense that everything can be had for a price. Communist-era shortages have disappeared, and with them, the need for complexly orchestrated connections to procure otherwise unavailable goods. Today only one thing is in short supply: money. “Then we had money, but there was nothing to buy; now there’s plenty to buy, but no money” became a standard observation in Romania and elsewhere in the region in the 1990s. In this context, while pile remains important, everyday coping strategies center on attempts to stretch or augment incomes. Under Ceaus¸escu, people would spend inordinate amounts of time and energy to obtain essential goods;15 today they do the same to save small and sometimes seemingly insignificant amounts of money.16 When Karcsi discovered he had forgotten his bus pass at home one day, for example, he walked the two miles into town rather than pay fifteen cents for a bus ticket. And it is very common for Clujeni to go out of their way to save a few cents when shopping for food.17 Many Clujeni, including the Mol14 On the relation between bribery and the broader phenomenon of the reciprocal exchange of favors in the context of ongoing relationships in post-Soviet Russia, see Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life, chapter 6. For a comparative study of low-level corruption in the relation between citizens and “street-level bureaucrats” in postcommunist East Central Europe, see Miller, Grødeland, and Koshechkina, A Culture of Corruption? 15 See Verdery, What Was Socialism, chapter 2. 16 This is not always simply a strategy to save a few pennies; it may also embody a sense of a “just” or appropriate price and correlative indignation about unjust prices. The indignation is fueled by sustained and substantial inflation. On the one hand, inflation makes routine economic calculations more difficult, and occasions a good deal of frustration and confusion. To avoid these difficulties and confusions, some people simply calculate in dollars, Deutschmarks, or (since 2002) Euros. But that, of course, poses its own arithmetic difficulties, and requires the habit of constantly converting lei into another currency at a frequently changing exchange rate. On the other hand, inflation is aggravated in postcommunist conditions by the fact that prices for many necessities were kept artificially low under Ceaus¸escu (as in many other communist regimes). One benchmark against which middle aged and elderly Clujeni judge prices—not only, or especially, specific money prices, but the relative prices of goods compared to wages—is set by that experience. Gas, electricity, and phone charges, for example—heavily subsidized by the previous regime—now absorb a large chunk of household budgets and seem shockingly disproportionate. Most other subsidies, too, have been abolished. Subsidized transportation and holiday accommodation placed a summer trip to the seaside within easy reach of many Clujeni throughout much of the Ceaus¸escu era; today, many are unable even to think of a seaside holiday. “I haven’t had a proper vacation in years” is a common lament. At the same time, of course, there is a better-off stratum that can now travel outside Romania, something that was difficult, and for most, impossible, under Ceaus¸escu. 17 Of course Clujeni do not simply look for rock-bottom prices; in an environment in which generalized trust remains exceptionally weak (see Halman, ed., The European Values Study, 44, for cross-national survey data on this point), personal trust is important. Vendors selling their own produce, for example, may be considered more trustworthy than the “intermediaries” (often associated in an ethnicizing manner with Gypsies) who sell produce from the big farms in the south of the country. Some shoppers, Romanian as well as Hungarian, say they seek out the hos¸ta˘zeni (hostátiak in Hungarian)—a dwindling group of Hungarian-speaking garden farmers whose lands on the outskirts of town (much-diminished in recent decades as the town has expanded) have supplied Cluj with much of its produce for generations; but these garden farmers are sought out as a long-known and trusted presence in the market, not as Hungarians.

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nárs, buy clothes in the second-hand stores that have proliferated in recent years; they cannot even think of patronizing the smart new boutiques. Others shop at the oser, or flea-market, on the edge of town; seek out the inexpensive clothes, shoes, toys, cigarettes, sweets, and the like— often imported (or smuggled) from Turkey or, increasingly, from China— that are sold in markets and streetside stalls; or buy second-hand items from local residents, mainly old and poor, who can be found on the fringes of the markets.18 Rural-urban exchanges were an important coping strategy under communism, and they have persisted since the change of regime. Many Clujeni who have relatives in nearby villages help out in the villages on weekends, and during peak labor periods; in return they receive meat, cheese, milk, and other products from the village economy. Mari and Zoli, for example, began eating more meat after Anca joined their household, thanks to the steady supply of food from Anca’s parents. Others have received land under provisions for the restitution of land seized by the communist regime.19 Clujeni seek in various ways to augment their earnings. Some do so by taking a second “official” job, but given the paltry salaries, this is not a particularly efficient strategy. A much preferred option is designated by the phrase mai fac un ciubuc—to make some extra money on the side through informal, off-the-books work.20 This can involve informal work as an independent provider of services, for example as a carpenter, plumber, auto mechanic, electrician, painter, hairdresser, or tutor. Most of those who have the skills and opportunities for such informal work hold an official job as well so as to qualify for pensions, unemployment benefits, medical care, sick leave, and other social benefits; but they often earn a good deal more on the side than in their official position. Such work has helped some Clujeni to start businesses of their own, serving as a means not only of getting by, but of getting ahead. Ciubuc also includes the widespread practice of working on the side while using the facilities and resources afforded by one’s workplace— tools, equipment, supplies, or simply working time. This may be done during regular working hours, or after hours, using workplace resources. Such practices were extremely common under socialism, in Romania and elsewhere. Private firms have attempted to crack down on them, and they are a major focus of employers’ complaints; but they continue to be considered routine and legitimate by many workers, who say that See plates 9d and 21. On the decollectivization of agriculture and its consequences in Transylvania, see Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare. 20 For estimates on the size of the informal economy in postcommunist Romania, see Ducheˆne, “Les revenus informels en Roumanie.” 18 19

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“everyone does it,” and that one cannot make ends meet from one’s official salary.21 Two further income-augmenting strategies should be mentioned. For a few years after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, many Clujeni, like others throughout the region, took advantage of still-subsidized transportation prices and stark cross-border differentials in the price and availability of goods by engaging in cross-border petty commerce.22 To “do” Turkey, Poland, or Hungary—as the Romanian idiom put it—came to designate this sort of enterprise. Like working on the side, this was both a means of getting by and, for some, a way of getting ahead. But as price differentials evened out, and as bigger players muscled in on the petty traders, crossborder commerce became more difficult, more expensive (because of the need to bribe customs officials), and more dangerous (for those seeking to make it big time). Cross-border smuggling had become a big business, and the small players were squeezed out. Like cross-border trading, transborder labor migration also flourished after the collapse of the Ceaus¸escu regime. The exit restrictions of communist states had crumbled, while entry and work restrictions were not yet in place, or were relatively easily circumvented. And just as transborder trade became more difficult after a few years, so did transborder migration. Yet while petty cross-border commerce ceased to be a viable individual option within a few years, labor migration remains an important coping strategy. And for those able to work in Germany, Italy, or another prosperous country, it can be a means of getting ahead, not just a way of getting by. Of course migration can also be a means of getting out—and not coming back.23 Mobilizing connections, bribing, skimping, second-hand shopping, and working on the side are strategies deployed equally by Romanians and Hungarians. Language competence and connections in Hungary, however, give Hungarians additional migration opportunities (and gave them additional opportunities for petty commerce in the early 1990s). Many (including Mari’s daughter, Zsuzsa, and her husband) have resettled in Hungary since the late 1980s, while many others (including Mari herself and her son, and Zsolt and Kati) have seriously considered doing so. A much larger number, including Gyuri and Karcsi, have worked temporarily or engaged in petty cross-border commerce in Hungary. Still, for Transylvanian Hungarians seeking to save up money by working temporarily abroad, Hungary is not seen as the most desirable 21 When the use of workplace materials and resources shades over into pilfering and petty theft, it is no longer routinely understood as legitimate, though some still justify this by saying that “everyone does it.” 22 On cross-border petty trading in postcommunist East Central Europe, see Stola, “Two Kinds of Quasi-Migration,” 94ff.; Okólski, “Incomplete Migration.” 23 See chapter 11, pp. 316ff.

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destination. Wages in Hungary, though considerably higher than in Romania, are far lower than in Western European countries; given the opportunity, Hungarians as well as Romanians prefer to work elsewhere, and think about migration opportunities in similar terms. Just as everyday problems and predicaments are rarely formulated in ethnic terms, so, too, the everyday strategies for dealing with them—and even migration, to a considerable extent—are largely indifferent to ethnicity.24 Getting Ahead While most Clujeni are struggling to get by, many are at the same time scheming about getting ahead, or at least about their children doing so.25 Starting a business is the most powerful cultural model for getting ahead, but it is a strategy that only a relatively small minority pursue seriously. When most people think concretely about improving their circumstances, they think about job prospects. For most Clujeni, getting ahead—if only a little bit ahead—means securing a desirable job. The search for employment is sometimes framed in ethnic terms. Some Hungarians report having been excluded from consideration by virtue of their ethnicity. In a few cases, they report being told directly, in effect, that “no Hungarians need apply.” More often, a rebuff is interpreted in ethnic terms, as, for example, when an employer appears to lose interest when he or she hears the Hungarian name of the applicant. Some Hungarians believe that this is a frequent occurrence, and that, more generally, they “have to work twice as hard.” On the whole, however, job competition is less ethnicized today than it was in the interwar period or even under communism.26 Today, in line with the general individualization of society, competition for desirable 24 Migration talk among Romanians and among Hungarians is often ethnicized through stigmatizing references to Gypsies, who are held to have ruined the image of Romanian citizens abroad. See chapter 11, pp. 323–25. 25 As we have seen, no sharp line can be drawn between getting by and getting ahead. The income-augmenting strategies we have discussed—working on the side, cross-border commerce, and transborder labor migration—are strategies for getting by and for getting ahead. The same is true of searching for employment and running one’s own business, which we discuss in this section. 26 In the interwar period, as we saw in chapters 2 and 3, competition for positions in the urban economy was explicitly ethnicized. And in the 1970s and 1980s, many Hungarians felt they were being slowly squeezed out of leading positions in factories and other workplaces. When one looks back on the full sweep of the history of Cluj and Transylvania in the twentieth century, the pervasive ethnic framing of labor market competition appears to have been a concomitant of the long-standing Romanian nationalist aspiration to “conquer” the urban economy, from which Romanians—although the majority in Transylvania as a whole—had been effectively excluded under Hungarian rule. Once this “conquest” of the towns had been completed, however—as it had been by the 1980s in Cluj—the conditions for the pervasive ethnicization of labor market competition no longer obtained. A large-scale survey in 2000 found that only 25 percent of Transylvanian Hungarians believed that Hungarians were disadvantaged when applying for a job (Research Center for Interethnic Relations, “Ethnobarometer,” 330).

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positions tends to be experienced and articulated in individual, not collective, terms.27 Getting a job may require—depending on the position— qualifications, connections, or cash (or some combination of these). All of these are individually held or mobilized resources.28 Connections, to be sure, may be based largely on intraethnic relationships. Yet what matters is having the right connections, not having the right ethnicity; without the right connections, ethnicity does not help. Even if the social networks that provide access to good jobs in certain sectors are largely Romanian, those excluded from the networks are also largely Romanian. Hungarians and Romanians talk about the use of pile, or connections, in the same non-ethnic terms. As noted above, pile—or a cash bribe—may be needed even for undesirable jobs. The rumored “price” of access to more desirable positions can be quite substantial—$5,000 or more, for example, for lucrative positions like that of notary.29 But this is not to say that all positions require bribes, or that qualifications are unimportant. In many fields, formal qualifications and demonstrable competence obviously matter a great deal. And as a strategy of getting ahead, education remains crucial. Especially in families without convertible social capital (connections) or economic capital, strategies for getting ahead focus on the accumulation of cultural capital. Although Clujeni realize that a university degree as such no longer guarantees access to a job, parents remain very concerned about their children being admitted to a university. This is in considerable part a matter of social status, and to a certain extent independent of field of study. But fields with promising job prospects are of course in high demand. Besides traditional fields such as law and medicine, these include computer science, business, accounting, and English, which are seen as 27 In one respect, ethnicity figures in the contemporary labor market in a way that lessens rather than heightens interethnic competition. The expansion of Hungarian-language higher education since the regime change has led many Hungarian university graduates to seek positions in the Hungarian cultural sector or in the incipient Hungarian ethnic economy in Cluj, or to seek employment in Hungary, and to exclude themselves—in part because of limited Romanianlanguage competence in their field—from the general Romanian labor pool. To the extent that a substantial split labor market does emerge along ethnic lines—and there is as yet no reliable data on the magnitude of the phenomenon—then ethnically framed competition for jobs will decrease, since competition will be increasingly intraethnic even as ethnicity becomes increasingly important as a structural feature of the labor market. (On this phenomenon in other settings, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 128.) 28 A recent study of postcommunist Latvia and Ukraine has reported a similar finding that labor market competition is seen in more individualist and less ethnicized terms than was the case under communism. See Bloom, “Economic Reform and Ethnic Cooperation.” 29 Stories about outrageous bribes are part of what can be called the folklore of the transition, and it is not always clear whether they are accurate representations of an “external” economic reality or are better seen as constitutive parts of a broader psychological, cultural, and economic reality. For an anthropological approach to corruption, focusing on issues of meaning and representation, see Shore and Haller, eds., Corruption.

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providing a good chance for employment in more dynamic, internationally oriented economic sectors, and perhaps for a job with a foreign firm, or for the opportunity to work abroad.30 Preparing one’s children for a rapidly changing educational and occupational environment is a central preoccupation of parents. This can involve trying to secure admission to prestigious high schools or middle schools; investing in private tutoring to increase the chances of success on the standardized tests that are crucial for high school and university admissions; and maximizing instruction in and exposure to English from an early age. The parental preoccupation with English is especially striking. Outstanding English skills are widely seen as an indispensable means of getting ahead. They increase one’s chances of working for a foreign firm, or in an internationally oriented economic sector; they also open the door to opportunities to travel, work, or study abroad (as may proficiency in other foreign languages). At a more modest level, English is increasingly viewed as indispensable simply for getting by. Even advertisements for secretarial positions frequently list knowledge of English as a requirement. As one taxi driver put it, after observing that most kids speak foreign languages, “People realize that you can only get a job by knowing a foreign language, especially English.” English-only private kindergartens flourish despite being quite expensive by local standards, and English-intensive courses of instruction have proliferated at all levels. Parents clamor for additional English instruction beyond what is formally provided; many pay substantial sums for private tutoring. It is not only the cultural and educational elite that seek English instruction for their children, but ordinary Clujeni; one English teacher at a Cluj high school was asked for private lessons not only by many parents but by the school carpenter, the secretary, and two of the cleaning women.31 The iconic path to economic success remains starting one’s own business, and there are few ambitious young people who have not at least considered doing so, or tried their hand at one enterprise or another. Starting a business is not seen as a panacea, as it was in the early 1990s, when microenterprises proliferated, the vast majority of them quickly 30 Analagous considerations govern the choice of specialization in academic high schools between math-science and humanities tracks and, within each track, between a variety of “sections,” with computer science and English sections being especially popular. 31 Romanians generally know English better than Hungarians. English is the second language for Romanians, but the third language for Hungarians, who must also learn Romanian. Romanians can therefore, on average, devote more time and energy to English than Hungarians, whose studies of English have to come at the cost of something else. (One indicator of this is that there are more “English-intensive” classes in Romanian than in Hungarian schools, though they are in demand in the latter as well.) This is a structural asymmetry that bears on life chances, though we have not heard Clujeni themselves interpret it in ethnic terms. On the different positions of statewide and regional majorities and minorities in multilingual states with respect to the number of languages they must learn, see Laitin, “Language Policy and Political Strategy in India.”

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failing. The many obstacles to success through small business—the lack of start-up capital, punitive taxation, burdensome bureaucracy, dishonest employees, and pervasive corruption—are widely recognized. Still, starting a business is seen as the paradigmatic way of getting ahead, though scarcely as an easy or automatic road to success. For the most part, the difficulties faced by start-up entrepreneurs are characterized in the same way by Hungarians and Romanians. However, when Mayor Funar was in office, some Hungarians reported experiencing additional difficulties starting or expanding a small business. Since enterprises depend on the municipality for various sorts of permits, this provided an opportunity not only for (ethnically neutral) corruption, but also for ethnic exclusion. Yet complaints such as these served as an occasional counterpoint to a prevailingly non-ethnicized account emphasizing capital, connections, and corruption along with the classical entrepreneurial virtues of energy, initiative, and hard work. Laci’s story is representative of this sort of nonethnicized account. A young Hungarian entrepreneur who grew up in a tough Cluj neighborhood, Laci is proud of his success as a self-made man, and has little patience with the gloomy, fatalistic stance of some of his friends. Ethnicity has been a resource, not a hindrance, for Laci (and for some other Hungarian entrepreneurs). Already in the late Ceaus¸escu era, when his parents took advantage of annual trips they were permitted to make to Hungary to smuggle in scarce goods (including the birth control pills that were in huge demand thanks to the extreme difficulty of obtaining contraceptives in Romania),32 Laci was enlisted to sell candy procured in Hungary to his elementary school classmates. After the change of regime, Laci worked the border in the other direction, selling cheap goods from Romania and Turkey—including counterfeit cigarettes from Turkey—in Budapest. Laci has also bought second-hand electronics and appliances in Hungary and resold them in Romania. Laci readily admits to—and relishes telling of—a variety of more or less shady dealings. He makes no apologies for this: business in postcommunist Romania has its own rules, and one has to play by them. But those rules, on his account, are not biased against Hungarians: what matters for success is that one work hard, take risks, exploit market opportunities in creative ways—and not be too finicky about keeping one’s hands clean. Laci certainly considers himself Hungarian; he even styles himself a patron of the Hungarian theater (having wanted to be an actor himself ). But as an entrepreneur, his ethnicity has been either irrelevant or (in his early cross-border enterprises) an asset. Even Zsolt, whose 32 On pronatalism and, more generally, political demography under Ceaus ¸ escu, see the authoritative account in Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity.

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entire habitus is much more “Hungarian” than that of Laci, and whose business (unlike Laci’s many undertakings) serves a largely Hungarian clientele, does not feel disadvantaged by his ethnicity in his business dealings; and he was able to draw on Hungarian connections in securing office space for his business.

Accounting for Success People are preoccupied not only with their own schemes for getting ahead, but also with the ways in which others are getting ahead. A significant and visible minority of Clujeni are prospering, and the signs of their success are conspicuous: fashionable clothes, foreign cars, and—for those who have succeeded in a big way—newly constructed villas. In accounting for the striking disparities in economic fortune—in explaining why “they” get ahead while “we” struggle to get by—Clujeni draw on a moralized and moralizing language. Success—at least success on a grand scale—is ordinarily seen as morally tainted, while hardship is portrayed as the inescapable price of virtue. The prevailing refrain, which we encountered earlier in this chapter from Gyuri and Andreea, is that those who work “honestly” (cinstit, becsületesen) can barely scrape by, while only “those who steal” or who are involved in “dirty business” can do better. This is sometimes ethnicized, in that “theft” and “dirty business” are in some contexts associated with Roma, an association reinforced by the media.33 Yet while Roma are associated with petty theft, and are widely understood to have cornered a few market niches, they are not associated with the more spectacular forms of theft and dirty business that, in popular understanding, have created a new elite in Cluj. On the whole, the moralizing language that is used to distinguish “those on top” from “ordinary people” is seldom ethnicized. While many Clujeni deploy starkly moralized contrasts between “clean” and “dirty” affairs, or between those who work “honestly” and those who “steal,” many others are more cynical. (Frequently, the same people use moralizing and cynical language in different contexts.) On the more cynical view, “everybody steals” (tot¸i fura˘, mindenki lop), not just those at the top. This formulation is heard with great frequency, both as a complaint, especially by entrepreneurs, referring to their employees, and as an acknowledgment by ordinary Clujeni. In the latter case, “stealing”—used expansively to designate an array of morally or 33 Verdery, “Nationalism and National Sentiment,” 197–98, and this volume, chapter 11, pp. 323–25.

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legally dubious actions34—is presented as an indispensable means of getting by, not just an elective way to get ahead. As an electrician in his mid-forties put it in a group discussion, “Twenty-four hours a day, all we do is think of how to steal and lie.” But even these disillusioned accounts draw a distinction of scale. Ordinary people may “steal,” but they still do not get ahead. Either they are not in a position to “steal” much in the first place, or they do not get away with it. It is frequently observed that the small offender gets punished, while those who steal on a grand scale go free. Getting ahead is not only something done by morally compromised others; as we have seen, it is also an avowed aspiration, indeed a preoccupation, of many Clujeni. This is especially the case among young people, who are less likely to see material success as irredeemably tainted. Still, most young Clujeni, too, see success as something that happens to others, and draw a sharp and heavily moralized distinction between “them”—those on top—and “us.” In a study of ethnicity, it is important to keep in mind that this distinction is seldom cast in ethnic terms.

Conclusion By decentering ethnicity in this chapter, we have sought to avoid a characteristic pitfall of work on ethnicity: that of reproducing the overethnicized view of the social world that is characteristic of many intellectuals and of ethnic and nationalist activists. This is not to minimize the significance of nationalist politics or everyday ethnicity in Cluj. But in order to understand how ethnicity matters—a crucial question for us throughout this part of the book—it is important to bear in mind how little it matters to much of everyday experience. The everyday preoccupations of most Clujeni, we have seen, are not readily ethnicized. Difficulties of getting by and strategies for getting ahead are only intermittently seen in ethnic terms by Hungarians, and (with the exception of occasional references to Gypsies) are rarely seen in such terms by Romanians. Awareness of the limited relevance of ethnicity to everyday social experience leaves us in a better position to grasp the social processes through which ethnicity is produced and reproduced—to the extent that it is produced and reproduced—in everyday life. It is to one of the most important of these processes—categorization—that we turn in the next chapter. 34 In this expansive sense, “stealing” includes a wide range of actions that are not fully legitimate, including bribery, corruption, nonreporting of income, and appropriating (or “borrowing”) materials, or even time, from one’s employer.

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Several provisional conclusions can be drawn from the two preceding chapters. First, neither nationalist politics nor ethnic identity is an everyday preoccupation for the vast majority of Clujeni. The themes sounded by nationalist politicians, Romanian and Hungarian, in Cluj, Bucharest, and Budapest, are remote from their everyday cares and concerns, even from those of persons sympathetic to nationalist claims. The everyday concerns of Clujeni, moreover, are only occasionally interpreted and experienced in ethnic terms. Social connections, political power, economic interests, and moral corruption are more readily invoked than ethnicity in explaining who gets what and why. And ethnicity has little bearing on strategies for getting by or getting ahead. Our second interim conclusion qualifies the first. Our portraits and our discussion of everyday preoccupations suggest that Hungarians are more inclined than Romanians to see the social world through an ethnic lens.1 This greater readiness of Hungarians—as of ethnic minorities in other settings—to draw on ethnic interpretive schemes bespeaks a basic asymmetry in the experience of everyday ethnicity, a point we will develop further in this and subsequent chapters. Third, ethnicity is usefully understood for our purposes as a modality of experience, rather than as a thing, a substance, an attribute that one “possesses,” or a distinct domain of life. This, too, will be central to our argument in Part Two. Ethnicity is a way of seeing, a way of talking, a way of acting; a skilled practical accomplishment; a cognitive, discursive, or pragmatic frame; a way of understanding and interpreting experience. It is not a self-subsistent domain, but a way of making sense of the social world—including, of course, everyday problems and preoccupations. The world cannot be partitioned into ethnic and non-ethnic domains: rather, the most various matters—getting a job, finding a doctor, complaining about politics, arguing with a spouse, perceiving passersby on the street—can be seen and done, experienced and 1 This does not mean that Hungarians see the world in one way, Romanians in another. The preceding chapter showed that in many respects, most Hungarians and most Romanians interpret everyday problems and preoccupations in remarkably similar ways. The asymmetry that we will explore in this and subsequent chapters is a qualification of this point, not an alternative to it.

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enacted in ethnic or non-ethnic terms. Ethnicity is a matter of seeing (and doing) as.2 Finally, as a modality of experience, ethnicity is not a continuous but an intermittent phenomenon. It happens at particular moments, and in particular contexts, when Clujeni interpret their experience or diagnose situations or identify themselves or others in ethnic terms. Although we speak routinely of persons as having an ethnicity, we might more aptly speak of them doing ethnicity at such moments; although we routinely speak of them as being Hungarian or Romanian, we might more aptly speak of them becoming Hungarian or Romanian, in the sense that “Hungarian” or “Romanian” becomes the relevant, operative description or “identity” or self-understanding at that particular moment and in that particular context.3 Our concerns in the present chapter follow from these observations, most directly from the last three points. As a perspective on the world, and a way of acting in the world, ethnicity operates in and through categories. The bearing of categorization and classification on ethnicity is a large and complex topic; we limit our attention here to the ways in which ethnicity works through categories in everyday experience and interaction. We recognize, of course, that state policies, political struggles, organizational practices, social movements, and cultural discourses significantly shape everyday categorization processes and practices.4 We devoted the first part of the book to delineating the wider contexts within which the categories and commonsense knowledge drawn upon in everyday experience are formed. In later chapters, too, we analyze the ways in which ethnicity as a lived and enacted experience responds to broader political, organizational, and cultural contexts.5 Our interest in this chapter, however, is more local: we are interested in the specific, situated processes and practices through which ethnicity “happens” in everyday experience and interaction. 2 For an elaboration of this line of argument, see Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, esp. chapters 1 and 3. For an account of nationalism as “a way of talking and thinking and seeing the world,” owing more to Foucault and less to interactionist and cognitive work than the view developed here, see Calhoun, Nationalism (the quotation is from p. 1). 3 There are of course important aspects of ethnicity that are continuous rather than intermittent. These include embodied schemas of interpretation; underlying political and economic inequalities; discursive forms, repertoires of contention, and objectified symbols such as flags, maps, and monuments; and, perhaps most important in Cluj, the institutional undergirding provided by parallel school systems, churches, media, and other institutions (we address the latter in chapter 9). As an experiential phenomenon or interactional accomplishment, however, ethnicity is fundamentally intermittent and episodic; on this point, see Moerman, “Ariadne’s Thread and Indra’s Net,” 94. 4 See for example Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, chapter 5; Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 12–13, 41–44, 65–69. The work of Jenkins has been distinctive in giving sustained attention to ethnic categorization in a wide range of contexts, formal and informal. 5 See esp. chapters 9, 11, and 12.

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Everyday categorization has a cognitive and a discursive or interactional aspect; it is both mental process and social practice. As a cognitive process, it involves perceiving (ordinarily, seeing or hearing) or conceiving (imagining or remembering) someone as a member of a particular category. As a social practice, it involves expressly or implicitly characterizing or formulating the identity of a person in this way. As a cognitive process, of course, categorization is not directly observable. There is a large experimental literature on the subject, but it has little direct bearing on our understanding of the everyday experience of ethnicity in Cluj. To get at the cognitive dimensions of categorization, we must make do with participants’ reports on when and how they identify others in ethnic terms. As data, such reports leave much to be desired; we therefore give more sustained attention here to the observable discursive and interactional aspects of categorization.6 We begin by considering the ways in which the categories “Hungarian” and “Romanian,” though seemingly parallel or coordinate, are in fact organized and deployed in deeply asymmetrical ways. With this as background, the rest of the chapter examines in fine-grained detail how ethnicity becomes relevant to everyday social experience in Cluj. We discuss the visual and verbal cues through which the ethnic category membership of strangers can be identified. Next, shifting from the perceptual and cognitive to the discursive and interactional aspects of categorization, we consider the ways in which people use ethnic categories to account for an action or stance, hold others accountable for their actions or stances, claim insider status, pre-emptively ward off criticism, and police category boundaries. We conclude by considering the relation between ethnic and other categories, notably regional categories, through which the work of ethnicity sometimes gets done. One final preliminary point may serve to avoid misunderstanding. We have distanced ourselves from the notion that “the Hungarians” and “the Romanians” constitute distinct, bounded groups in Cluj, and from the notion that Clujeni simply are Hungarian or Romanian—a notion, we have suggested, at variance with the intermittent and episodic nature of ethnicity. And yet, as the reader will have noticed, we do not hesitate to identify persons as Hungarian or Romanian, or to refer in a generalizing manner to “Hungarians” and “Romanians.” We need to make clear, therefore, what we mean when we refer to someone as Hungarian or Romanian. On the one hand, this can be a general, context-independent, nominal characterization. When we refer to someone as Hungarian or Romanian in this sense, we mean that she 6 On the cognitive dimension of ethnicity, see Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition.”

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would consistently and unambiguously identify herself as Hungarian or Romanian if asked to identify herself by ethnic nationality; she would have no difficulty placing herself in a particular ethnonational category, given a particular set of ethnonational categories from which to choose.7 On the other hand, characterizing someone as Hungarian or Romanian can be a context-specific, experiential characterization.8 It can mean that in a particular context, “Hungarian” or “Romanian” is the relevant or operative category or identity. In this sense, it can be said that someone becomes Hungarian or Romanian at a particular moment. Our primary interest in Part Two is in experiential ethnicity. But nominal ethnicity is relevant as well, for there is a connection between one’s nominal ethnicity and the likelihood that one’s ethnicity will become experientially salient. As we suggested above, Hungarians are more likely than Romanians to experience and interpret the world in ethnic terms (and thereby to become Hungarian in the particular situations in which they do so experience or interpret the world). Some nominal Hungarians (and more Romanians) are rarely experientially Hungarian (or Romanian). Their Hungarianness (or Romanianness) is rarely a meaningful interactional identity; for them, “Hungarian” or “Romanian” is a correct but not a very significant categorical description—and not an apt or telling characterization in most contexts. Conversely, though less frequently, one can be experientially Hungarian or Romanian, at a particular moment and in a particular context, without being nominally Hungarian or Romanian. This is the case for persons—such as some of those who grow up in ethnically mixed families—who can not unambiguously place themselves in ethnonational categories, yet who may feel Hungarian or Romanian, or be treated as such, in certain contexts. When we refer in a generalizing manner to “Hungarians” or “Romanians,” these designations have a purely aggregative meaning. They refer to sets of persons sharing a nominal ethnonational category membership, with no implication that the sets constitute solidary groups. It is useful to refer to these sets because they differ, on average, from one another, in ways that are relevant for our study, with Hungarians—on average—more prone to ethnicize their experience than Romanians, and tending, as we suggest in the next section, to experience ethnicity in differing ways. 7 Our point is not that all Transylvanians can unambiguously or unproblematically place themselves in an ethnonational category. A small but nontrivial minority—mainly some children of ethnically mixed marriages—cannot do so. These people cannot be characterized in a contextindependent manner as “Hungarian” or “Romanian.” 8 We follow here Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 41, 56, 71–72, who draws a similar distinction between nominal and virtual aspects of ethnic identity.

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Asymmetries It is hard to avoid implicitly or explicitly treating “Hungarian” and “Romanian” as parallel or coordinate categories. There are Hungarian- and Romanian-language schools; Hungarian and Romanian churches;9 Hungarian and Romanian newspapers; Hungarian and Romanian theater and opera companies, even Hungarian and Romanian sections of the municipal puppet theater. For the 2002 census, as for earlier censuses, one could choose Hungarian or Romanian (or one of several other categories) to indicate one’s ethnocultural nationality, and also to indicate one’s native language. Most Clujeni recognize Hungarian and Romanian as two basic “kinds” of people in town, and they sometimes make the parallelism explicit. Yet in important respects, “Hungarian” and “Romanian” are not parallel, coordinate, symmetrical categories. The asymmetry has obvious political, institutional, and demographic dimensions. The very condition of identifying with a minority nationality in a state defined as the state of and for a majority nationality is by definition asymmetrical, and almost always involves asymmetries of power, position, and perspective.10 But there are more subtle experiential and interactional asymmetries as well, and it is these that concern us here. Marked and Unmarked Categories The distinction between marked and unmarked categories—originally developed in linguistics, but subsequently applied in semiotics, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology—can help illuminate these experiential asymmetries.11 The unmarked category is the normal, default, taken-for-granted category, while the marked category is special, differ9 Affiliates of Catholic and Calvinist churches in Cluj are overwhelmingly Hungarian, and services are conducted in Hungarian; affiliates of Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches are overwhelmingly Romanian. On the ways in which churches help sustain a Hungarian “world” in Cluj, see chapter 9, pp. 277ff. 10 This foundational asymmetry is one source of the reservations of some influential political thinkers about the idea of minority rights. See for example Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269–76, criticizing the League of Nations Minority Protection Treaties for institutionalizing the notion that minorities “lived outside normal legal protection and needed an additional guarantee of their elementary rights from an outside body,” that “only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions, that persons of different nationality needed some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated” (275). On the ambiguities of minority rights, see also Kovács, “A nemzeti önrendelkezés csapdája.” 11 In linguistics (where the distinction was developed by Joseph Greenberg and others, building on earlier work by Prague school linguists Trubetzkoy and Jakobson), three aspects of markedness have been distinguished: formal, distributional, and semantic. Formal markedness

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ent, “other.” Thus theorists of gender, race, and sexuality have observed that “woman” is a marked category, “man” unmarked; that “black” and to a lesser extent other nonwhite racial categories are marked in America, while “white” is unmarked; and that “homosexual” is marked, “heterosexual” unmarked. In Cluj, Hungarian is ordinarily a marked category, while Romanian is unmarked. Unmarked categories need not be expressed at all in most contexts; this is a key part of what makes them unmarked. Thus “Romanian” is generally taken for granted as the reference category, and unexpressed, while “Hungarian” is more likely to be expressed. Similarly, speaking Romanian, in most contexts, is the unmarked—and therefore unremarked—practice, while speaking Hungarian is marked.12 Yet as linguists have noted, marking relationships can be reversed in particular contexts. Within the Hungarian “world” that Zsolt and Kati (and many other Hungarians) inhabit, it is Romanian that is marked, while Hungarian is unmarked and taken for granted.13 As a result, the category “Hungarian” is often unexpressed, while the marked category “Romanian” is more likely to be made explicit. Among Hungarians, for example, one might say “My sister married a Romanian doctor,” but not “My sister married a Hungarian doctor”; absent specific information to the contrary, the default assumption would be that the sister’s husband was Hungarian. This reversal of the marking relationships prevailing in the wider society was nicely illustrated by one elderly Hungarian woman’s characterization of her “very nice” neighbors: “There’s a doctor, a lawyer, a Romanian family, and a teacher.” Striking here is the combination of category terms from two distinct category sets, occupation and ethnicity. The neighbors referred to by their professions were all Hungarians. For this woman, Hungarian was clearly the unmarked category, which could go without saying, while Romanian was marked. refers to the fact that some linguistic items (lexical forms, grammatical forms, phonological patterns) are opposed to others by being overtly marked (by grammatical suffix, for example), while others are unmarked (or marked in less overt or phonologically or morphologically less complex ways). Distributional markedness refers to the frequency with which the elements of pairs or sets of items appear; unmarked items appear more frequently. Semantic markedness refers to specificity or generality of meaning; unmarked terms are said to convey a more general meaning than marked terms. Broader uses of the notion of marked and unmarked categories outside linguistics build most directly on the distributional and semantic notions of markedness; at the same time, they extend the meaning of markedness so that unmarked terms are taken to convey a taken-forgranted reference category, while marked terms convey some kind of “difference,” or “otherness,” with respect to this reference category. On markedness in linguistics, see Lyons, Semantics, 305–11; Andersen, “Markedness Theory.” 12 See chapter 8, p. 243. 13 For Zsolt and Kati, see chapter 5, pp. 184ff.; for the Hungarian world more generally, and the reversal of marking relationships within it, see chapter 9, pp. 266, 273–74.

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Ethnicity and Citizenship The notion of marked and unmarked categories applies primarily to paired categories. But “Hungarian” and “Romanian” do not—or not always—work in this way, as part of a categorical pair; they are not always part of the same system of classification. Categories come in sets: male and female; Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew; schoolteacher, sales clerk, plumber, doctor. The term “category” is sometimes used to refer to the individual categories in a set, and sometimes to the set itself. Thus male, Christian, and schoolteacher are categories; but so are sex, religion, and occupation. For clarity, we will follow here the practice of conversation analysis and distinguish individual categories (male, Christian, schoolteacher) from the category sets to which they belong (sex, religion, and occupation).14 It might seem obvious that Romanian and Hungarian belong to the same category set. But this is not always the case. As categories designating kinds of persons, both “Romanian” and “Hungarian” can belong to at least two different category sets: to the category set “citizenship”; and to the category set “ethnicity.” “Romanian” can designate a person with Romanian citizenship (or, more broadly, someone who lives permanently in Romania); but it can also designate someone who identifies her ethnocultural nationality as Romanian. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for “Hungarian.” In most everyday contexts in Transylvania, “Hungarian” as a citizenship category is irrelevant; as a result, “Hungarian” generally designates ethnicity. “Romanian,” on the other hand, can designate either citizenship or ethnicity, or an undifferentiated mix of both, depending on context. This is not simply a point about the way category terms are used; it is also, and more fundamentally, a point about the experience of identifying oneself as Hungarian or Romanian in Transylvania. To identify oneself as Hungarian is to identify oneself in terms of ethnocultural nationality, based in the first instance on language. It is also to identify oneself in implicitly comparative terms as Hungarian-and-not-Romanian. To identify oneself as Romanian, by contrast, is to identify oneself in terms of some (often inextricable) mixture of ethnocultural nationality, citizenship, and “country.”15 And the implicit comparative reference (Romanian-and-not-Hungarian) is ordinarily attenuated, if present at 14 On categories and category sets, see Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, 1:40–48, 333–40, 396–403, 578–96; 2:184–87; for a retrospective discussion, see Schegloff, “A Tutorial on Membership Categorization.” 15 By “country” we mean that “Romanian” can signal not only ethnicity or citizenship per se, but the country in which one lives, along with its geography, culture, history, institutions, customs, and so on.

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all. There is no chronic comparative reference to “Hungarian” implied in self-identification as Romanian, whereas a chronic comparative reference to “Romanian” is implied in self-identification as Hungarian. Of course Transylvanian Hungarians, too, in certain contexts, identify themselves in terms of citizenship or country of residence.16 But this is not part of identifying themselves as Hungarian. Ethnocultural, citizenship, and country identification are differentiated for Transylvanian Hungarians, while they tend to be conflated for Transylvanian Romanians. This asymmetry is illustrated by an incident involving Ági and her grandfather Karcsi, to which we alluded in chapter 5. Ági, who lives and works in a largely Romanian world, but who speaks Hungarian at home with her grandparents, happened to use the word “Romanians” in a way that clearly included herself and her family. For her the word referred to all citizens or residents of Romania. For Romanians, this usage is routine, and Ági had no doubt picked it up unselfconsciously. But it provoked an immediate correction from her grandfather: “We’re not Romanians, we’re Hungarians.” For Karcsi, ethnicity and citizenship are sharply distinct. He and his family are Romanian citizens, but that does not make them “Romanian”; the category “Romanian” has a specifically ethnic meaning for Hungarians, though not for Romanians. A second example comes from a conversation at the home of the Molnár family.17 Veronika, seventeen at the time, considers herself Romanian, but speaks Hungarian as well, having grown up in an ethnically mixed family with a Hungarian father (and stepfather) and a Romanian mother (who herself grew up in a mixed family and speaks Hungarian as well as Romanian). In the course of the conversation (which occurred in Hungarian), Veronika complained of being treated by her Romanian high school classmates as Hungarian in certain contexts despite her self-understanding as a Romanian. A few moments later, she went on: “It’s no use considering myself Romanian [literally: belonging to the Romanians], I can’t get them . . .” At this point her mother Andreea broke in, ignoring Veronika’s complaint (and the “it’s no use”), and picking up instead on the “belonging to the Romanians”: “but for her—she was born here in Romania, like me, and of course I belong here [literally “I belong to it,” that is, to Romania].” The interesting point here is that the same word for “belonging” was used twice—by Veronika to refer to ethnic belonging, and by Andreea to refer to territorial belonging. Andreea spoke as if she were confirming and explaining her daughter’s statement about belonging, even as she shifted 16 They are also sometimes identified by others in terms of an imputed loyalty to Hungary; this involves an implied citizenship-like identity. 17 For background on the family, see chapter 6, pp. 191ff.

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the meaning from belonging to “the Romanians” (where “the Romanians” are implicitly opposed to “the Hungarians,” and both are understood as ethnic groups), to belonging to Romania (as a country to which one belongs by virtue of being born there). Turning to refer to her Hungarian husband, Andreea went on, “He should belong, too [that is, to Romania, likewise by virtue of being born there], but of course he’s drawn to Hungarians, well that’s what you’d expect.” Here Andreea displayed—and enacted—the asymmetry we have described by differentiating between ethnic and civic-territorial attachments for her Hungarian husband (“He should belong, too [civic], but he is drawn to Hungarians [ethnic]”), while conflating the ethnic and civic aspects of belonging for herself and her daughter. Another example, from a Hungarian group discussion, shows that the category “Romanian” has a more ethnicized meaning for Hungarians than for Romanians. Matyi, an unemployed high school graduate and aspiring poet, recounted a story about four well-known athletes appearing on a television sports program. He introduced the four athletes by name, making it clear that they were all Hungarian. The punch line of the story was that the television announcer had remarked “how much time had passed since four such important Romanian athletes were gathered in the studio at the same time.” Matyi immediately added, “and all four were Hungarian” (that is, Hungarian-and-notRomanian). This was said for our benefit as outsiders and was selfevident to the other participants;18 one participant had even interrupted at an early point in the story, as Matyi was in the course of reporting the athletes’ names, “all important Romanian athletes, hah!,” thereby anticipating the punch line. Both interruption and punch line were oriented to the irony and incongruity of the characterization “Romanian,” for this was clearly understood by the participants in a comparative ethnocultural frame, as Romanian-and-notHungarian, rather than in a noncomparative, encompassing civic frame. Only after the completion of the story did another participant, as if to qualify this shared sense of incongruity, allow that another sense of “Romanian” existed: “Well, Romanian in the sense of citizenship, if you take it that way.” Salience The final—and perhaps most important—aspect of asymmetry is one to which we have already alluded. Like most minorities, Hungarians are generally more sensitive to ethnicity than Romanians, and more inclined 18

Brubaker and Fox were moderating this group discussion.

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to experience and interpret the social world in ethnic terms. As a frame of vision and template of interpretation, ethnicity is more cognitively accessible, experientially salient, and interactionally consequential for Hungarians. Ethnic categories lie more readily at hand, and other categories are more readily ethnicized. The category “Romanian,” for example, as we have just seen, is more readily and consistently ethnicized by Hungarians than by Romanians. A further aspect of this asymmetry is that Hungarians, assuming that Romanians share their view of the social world, sometimes impute a more ethnicized perspective to Romanians than Romanians actually have. When Zsolt moved to Cluj from a Szekler town, for example, he was acutely conscious of his Hungarianness, and he was convinced that Romanians saw him as conspicuously Hungarian. Romanians may well have been able to tell from his accent or uncertain syntax that he was Hungarian, but that does not mean that they paid particular attention to this fact or saw him consistently as a Hungarian.19 There are multiple reasons for this greater accessibility, sensitivity, and salience. “Hungarian,” we observed above, is generally the marked category in Transylvania, and Hungarians are reminded daily of this, even if those routine reminders remain largely outside conscious awareness. Discursive reminders come from the political claims and counterclaims—Romanian and Hungarian, at local, statewide, and inter-state levels—that filter in to their everyday lives through the media, and from the everyday talk that arises in response to things people hear or read about in the media. Objectified reminders saturated public space during the Funar years: statues, plaques, flags, and tricolor benches, streetside posts, and sidewalk trash bins. Even if overt interactional reminders (such as “Speak Romanian! We’re living in Romania!”) are rare, the experience of having to shift gears and speak in a language other than “one’s own” in public (and some private) contexts is, for most Hungarians, a daily reminder of markedness or otherness.20 19 Another example concerns the color green. According to some Hungarians, green alone is enough to make some Romanian nationalists see red (and white: the colors of the Hungarian flag are red, white, and green). A woman who worked for the Hungarian section of the local puppet theater believed that her Romanian boss, taking green as a symbol of Hungarianness, had been irritated by the head of the Hungarian section wearing a green T-shirt and leaning his green bike against the wall at the theater. Playing on this association, she then deliberately chose a green copy of the announcement of the fall premier to send to the mayor’s office, portraying this to us as a provocative gesture. Yet we have never heard any Romanian associate green with Hungarians. Transylvanian Romanians know that red, white, and green are the “Hungarian” colors. But the assumption that green by itself represents “Hungarianness” may simply reflect the differential salience of ethnicity, leading in this instance to an overethnicized interpretation of others’ perceptions and conduct. 20 See chapter 8, pp. 241, 255, 264.

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Cues Embodied Ethnicity Everyday experience in Cluj, as in any other urban setting, routinely brings people into close proximity, and often into interaction, with strangers. In some multiethnic urban settings, ethnicity is pervasively embodied, and visual cues enable residents to place strangers readily and reliably in ethnic categories.21 In Cluj, however, ethnicity can seldom be reliably “read” from visual evidence.22 Some Clujeni, to be sure, claim to be able to “tell” by sight whether someone is Hungarian or Romanian.23 When asked how, they are ordinarily evasive: “You can just tell,” as Lucian put it. One taxi driver admitted that “you can’t look at people and say they’re Romanian or Hungarian, it’s not written on their foreheads.” Yet later in the same conversation he, too, claimed to be able to tell—“not with everyone, but with some you can tell”—and he proceeded to demonstrate with passersby in the main square. Sometimes, the claim to be able to “tell” expresses a nationalist stance. A Romanian student leader claimed he could identify a Hungarian “anywhere”; an elderly Hungarian claimed he could determine ethnicity “right away, from their facial features.” In fact, physical appearance is more reliable as an indicator of rural/urban and north/south regional differences than of ethnonational differences.24 The unreliability of such visual identifications of ethnicity is suggested by the fact that no Hungarian would address a stranger in Hungarian on the basis of appearance alone, while Hungarians are sometimes willing to do so on the basis of linguistic cues. Learning to “tell” is sometimes part of what can be called “ethnic socialization.” In keeping with the differential salience of ethnicity noted above, this is more characteristic of Hungarians. One Hungarian recalls that her grandfather would occasionally encourage her as a child to try 21 Cues can include somatic features such as skin color, hair texture, facial structure, stature, or physique; enduring bodily modifications such as scarification, tattoos or piercings; bodybehavioral characteristics such as demeanor or gestural style; and hair and beard styles, dress, and adornment. See for example Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 45ff., and idem, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, 124ff. Visual cues are of course used to identify strangers not only by ethnicity but in other ways as well. See for example E. Anderson, Streetwise, chapter 8, analyzing the “street wisdom” that enables some residents of a racially mixed American urban neighborhood to negotiate public space with confidence. 22 Roma are an exception; many Roma—though by no means all—are identifiable by phenotypical characteristics or by dress. 23 On the notion of “telling,” in the context of Northern Ireland, see Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy, 37ff. 24 Occasionally clothing can be reliably indicative of ethnicity. Traditional peasant attire, though rarely seen in town outside the open-air markets, can serve as a reliable cue.

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to guess the ethnicity of strangers approaching on the street, and that they would check their guesses by the language spoken when the stranger would draw nearer. Although this was done as a kind of game, not as a conscious project of ethnic socialization, it had the effect of reinforcing the salience of ethnic categories, and of transmitting ethnic stereotypes, including the assumption, common among older Hungarians, that someone who looked like a “peasant” would be Romanian. Language A much richer and more reliable set of cues to ethnicity is provided by language. Language is not only an indicator, but a criterion of ethnicity.25 At times, language cues are themselves visual. The nametags worn by salespeople in some larger stores, and the nameplates on the doors of apartments, can provide such cues; so can seeing someone reading a Hungarian newspaper, magazine, or book. A taxi driver once addressed Fox in Hungarian at the end of a ride during which Fox had been speaking with the other passengers in Romanian and English; it turned out that the driver had noticed the Hungarian newspaper he was carrying. Most language cues, however, are aural rather than visual. The most obvious cue is simply hearing a particular language being spoken. But language cues are asymmetrical. Hungarian is more likely than Romanian to indicate ethnonational category membership. The unmarked or default practice for interaction in public between strangers, in Cluj, is to speak Romanian.26 This is normatively expected, and the norm is almost universally observed, by Hungarians as well as Romanians. When one hears Romanian spoken in public, therefore, one cannot presume that the speaker is Romanian. Spoken Hungarian, however, is often taken—by Hungarians and Romanians—as an indicator of the speaker’s ethnicity. When Katalin, a Hungarian from the Szekler region, arrived in Cluj to attend law school, with no friends in town, she was alert to the language spoken around her at the university: “You sit down and then when someone starts speaking Hungarian, it’s so uncommon, it strikes you right away. And so then ‘Hi!, you’re Hungarian too?’ ‘Yes, of course!,’ and ‘where are you from?’ and so on, and then you start sitting next to each other, and by the third time this happens there’s enough of us sitting together for us to take up three rows.” Hearing Hungarian being spoken allows Hungarians to presume that the speaker is Hungarian and licenses the hearer to speak 25 On the distinction between criteria and indicia of ethnicity, the former defining the basis of ethnic membership, the latter serving as cues to ethnic membership in practice, see Horowitz, “Ethnic Identity,” 119–20. 26 See chapter 8, pp. 243ff.

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Hungarian herself. This happens in other settings as well. When Hungarians notice Hungarian being spoken at a newspaper kiosk, or when they hear the Hungarian Tessék! or the Romanian/Hungarian Poftit¸i! Tessék! (“Can I help you?”) from vendors in the market, they can themselves speak Hungarian when their turn comes.27 While the fact that Romanian is spoken does not ordinarily serve as an indicator of ethnic category membership (since this is the default practice for public interaction among strangers), how Romanian is spoken can indeed serve as a cue. In a setting in which almost everyone is a native speaker of one of two languages, an accent, however slight, as well as certain minor but characteristic mispronunciations or mistakes, can suggest that the speaker is Hungarian. Here, again, there is an asymmetry—in fact a double asymmetry. Romanians are generally better equipped than Hungarians to detect a “Hungarian” accent or characteristically “Hungarian” errors in spoken Romanian, and thereby to infer ethnicity; yet they are less interested than Hungarians in making that inference. Most Romanians say they can ordinarily “tell” a Hungarian from her accent, but few attach much significance to this. A few bilingual Romanian “old Clujeni” may switch to Hungarian out of politeness when speaking with a Hungarian. And there are no doubt occasional situations where Romanian bureaucrats, employers, or others might treat a Hungarian differently from a Romanian interlocutor. Yet for the most part, ethnic category membership, even where “available” through auditory or other cues, is simply not relevant to public interaction among strangers. One cannot infer anything about the significance or salience of a categorical identity from its mere availability. For Hungarians, knowing the ethnicity of an interlocutor is more likely to matter, if only because it enables them to switch to Hungarian. In routine transactions—buying a newspaper, everyday shopping, or asking a stranger for directions—ethnicity is as irrelevant for Hungarians as it is for most Romanians.28 But for more complex or extended transactions—communicating with a nurse, doctor, or craftsman, getting a haircut, taking care of a bureaucratic problem, or talking with a taxi driver—Hungarians generally prefer to speak Hungarian (and therefore have an interest in identifying ethnicity from accent, or in some other 27 Vendors are also sensitive to such cues. On several occasions, when we asked (in Romanian) at a kiosk for some newspapers, including Szabadság, the local Hungarian paper, the vendor replied in Hungarian. 28 Even when there is nothing at stake, speaking Romanian with other Hungarians can seem “unnatural” to Hungarians. Once Fox was walking with a Hungarian friend when a car pulled up and the driver asked directions. The friend gave directions in Romanian. As the car pulled away, he noticed that it had Hungarian license plates, and said, “Oh, I could’ve spoken Hungarian with them!”

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manner). This preference may arise from a sense of not being able to communicate as well in Romanian;29 but even those who are perfectly comfortable speaking Romanian may prefer to speak Hungarian with fellow Hungarians out of a sense of appropriateness.30 Among Hungarians, Karcsi’s granddaughter Ági is atypical in inhabiting a largely Romanian world, and in speaking Romanian more fluently than Hungarian.31 She is proud of her excellent Romanian, noting that some Romanians “did not believe I was Hungarian.” Like most Romanians, she can easily tell ethnicity from accent; unlike most Romanians, she puts this knowledge to good use in the neighborhood grocery store where she works: “Some of them speak [Romanian] pretty well, but you can still tell, so I switch to Hungarian [ . . . ] though most of them of course I already know.” She was confident about her ability to “tell”: “I’ve never, ever, ever made a mistake [ . . . ] you can tell from their accent.” Recognizing a stranger as Hungarian can have extralinguistic consequences. Switching to Hungarian enabled Ági to establish a Hungarian identity with her customers, and thereby not only to communicate more effectively with those who spoke Romanian less well, but to win their trust, and to be a more effective sales clerk. And for the Hungarian law student described above, hearing Hungarian spoken was not simply a cue to speak Hungarian herself, but an invitation to initiate friendly conversation and sit together in class—a process that quickly led to the formation of a tightly integrated Hungarian group. Names Names, too, can offer cues to ethnic category membership. As noted above, nametags or nameplates sometimes serve as visual cues.32 When survey researchers are charged with finding Hungarian respondents, for example, they use names on apartment doors as a probabilistic indicator of ethnicity. Spoken names—in introductions and other contexts—can function as aural cues. Gyöngyi, another Hungarian law student, listened to the names during roll call in the same way that Katalin was alert to spoken Hungarian: “In the seminars they usually take attendance, and if 29 Ironically, those most interested in being able to switch for this reason are—precisely because of their weaker Romanian—least likely to be able to discern a Hungarian accent from spoken Romanian. 30 We return to this issue, and to other aspects of the relationship between language and ethnicity, in chapter 8. 31 See chapter 5, pp. 180ff. 32 When Ági took the law school entrance examination, she was asked—on the basis of her Hungarian name—whether she wanted to apply for places reserved for “minority” students (in practice mainly Hungarians, though in theory open to other minorities as well). In fact, she did not want to apply for minority set-aside spots, since she was concerned that she might then be expected to study in Hungarian, which her Romanian-language education left her ill-prepared to do.

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I hear a Hungarian name, I’ll ask them [if they are Hungarian].” In some contexts, hearing a Hungarian name, like hearing Hungarian being spoken, licenses an inquiry about ethnic category membership and—once common ethnicity is confirmed—invites further socialization. Names are not always reliable cues to ethnicity. When Gyöngyi heard a Hungarian name, she would not immediately treat the person as Hungarian (as Ági did when a customer spoke Romanian with a Hungarian accent); instead, she would ask if the person was Hungarian. By seeking confirmation, she displayed her orientation to the possibility that the Hungarian name might belong to a Romanian—a not infrequent occurrence in Transylvania. Many Romanians have Hungarian or Hungarianized last names, a legacy of marriage, assimilation, or the translation or Hungarianization of names during the era of Hungarian rule. Few such names have been retranslated into Romanian, though most have been adapted to the Romanian spelling and pronunciation systems. Similarly, many Hungarians have Romanian or Romanianized names. Some were acquired through marriage, others through the late communist practice of spelling many Hungarian last names in a Romanian manner (and translating many Hungarian first names) on official documents. Some Hungarians did not change the spelling or retranslate their Romanianized names after the change of regime, and continue to use these forms in official contexts.33 Displaying Ethnicity Our discussion of the ways in which physiognomy, dress, language, accent, and name can serve as cues—of varying reliability—to ethnic category membership has focused mainly on perceptual and cognitive aspects of identification. Yet identification is a social practice as well as a mental process, a way of doing as well as a way of seeing. We shift our attention here from the way ethnicity is perceived to the way it is enacted.34 33 Sometimes multiple versions of names are used in different contexts. We met one Hungarian man whose name appeared in four variants. Szilágyi János, the all-Hungarian variant, was the name on his apartment door. In the lobby of the apartment building, his name appeared as Szilágyi Ioan, his Hungarian last name and the Romanian version of his first name. In the phone book, he was listed as Silaghi János, a Romanianized version of his last name and his Hungarian first name. And his identification card read Silaghi Ioan, with both first and last names Romanianized. He did not find this incongruous or confusing, since everyone knew him as Jancsi anyway, this being the Hungarian diminutive of his first name. 34 On the tension between cognitive and discursive approaches to categorization, the latter treating categorization as “something we do, in talk, in order to accomplish social actions (persuasion, blaming, denials, refutations, accusations, etc.),” see Edwards, “Categories are for Talking,” 517. For the discursive critique of cognitivism, see also Billig, “Prejudice, Categorization and Particularization”; Potter and Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology; Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology; and Edwards, Discourse and Cognition.

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One aspect of the interactional enactment of ethnicity concerns what anthropologists have called the “overcommunication” (deliberate emphasizing) or “undercommunication” (deliberate downplaying) of ethnic category membership.35 In interactional perspective, cues are not simply cognitive resources that can be deciphered by observers; they are also discursive and interactional resources that can be deployed by actors. They are signs that can be consciously “given,” as well as unconsciously “given off.”36 Rather than serving simply to convey category membership, they can be used to signal or emphasize category membership—or to conceal it.37 In Cluj, as we saw in chapter 4, nationhood has been overcommunicated in political rhetoric and public space since the fall of Ceaus¸escu. Public space has been saturated with Romanian national colors, public discourse permeated with Romanian and Hungarian nationalist rhetoric. Among ordinary citizens, however, the overcommunication of ethnicity is rare. On major Romanian and Hungarian national holidays, some Clujeni wear small tricolor lapel ribbons, displaying the Romanian (red, yellow, and blue) or Hungarian (red, white, and green) national colors.38 Even on these festive occasions, only a minority wear these ribbons; on the other hand, a few older Hungarian Clujeni can occasionally be seen wearing them at other times. The tricolor lapel ribbon serves not only— or even primarily—to convey ethnic category membership to persons who might not already know it, but to display an affirmative stance toward that category membership, a gesture directed in the first instance toward other members of the same category.39 It conveys not only, or T. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 21. The distinction between “giving” and “giving off ” signs and signals was central to the dramaturgical perspective on interaction developed by Goffman. See for example the introduction to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 37 On the deliberate miscueing of ethnic category membership in severely divided societies, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 48–49. 38 See plate 4a. More conspicuous public visual displays of ethnic belongings are very rare. One incident we saw reported on local television played off the public display of the Romanian national colors. When Funar first had the benches repainted red, yellow, and blue, the local television station interviewed people on the streets for their reactions. Along with a series of comments (mostly negative and neutral), the report showed one elderly Hungarian woman holding up a jar of red, white, and green peppers, cabbages, and pickles. Even more rare are provocative visual displays of “doing being Hungarian” such as wearing a red-white-green necktie, as the ever-pugnacious Karcsi claimed to have done back in the 1960s. 39 The dual reference to ethnicity and citizenship in the category “Romanian” that we described above characterizes the display of Romanian national colors as well. And just as the category “Hungarian” has a more consistently ethnocultural reference, so, too, does the display of Hungarian national colors. But the reference is not entirely ethnocultural. Because these colors are also those of the flag of Hungary, their display—like the singing of the Hungarian national anthem—arouses the ire of many nationally minded Romanians. For unlike the use of the Hungarian language, these displays of ethnonational category membership can be construed as referring to another state, and therefore as signs of dubious loyalty to Romania. 35 36

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primarily, that one is Hungarian or Romanian, but that one is proud to be Hungarian or Romanian. Yet such deliberate displaying, emphasizing, or signaling of ethnic category membership is rare in Cluj. Language can also be used to display or conceal ethnicity. To address someone in Hungarian in a setting in which Romanian (as the default language) is expected is to provide a clear—and sometimes provocative— signal of ethnic category membership. Yet while an occasionally voiced Romanian complaint about Hungarians pertains to this, unambiguous instances are rare.40 Simply speaking Hungarian in a public setting, though this is almost always done unselfconsciously and without any intention of signaling ethnicity, can also be done deliberately, as a way of “doing being Hungarian.” Some of Karcsi’s stories suggest such a stance, but we never witnessed any unambiguous instance of this. On the other hand, Hungarianness can be undercommunicated by speaking Hungarian only discreetly, or not at all, in public settings.41 This is not a matter of trying to pass as Romanian, but simply of not calling attention to oneself as Hungarian. Another resource that can be drawn upon for this purpose is using Romanian versions of one’s Hungarian name in public contexts (such as telephone books, nameplates on doors, or directories in the entrance to apartment blocks), though this may be simply a matter of inertia or habit. Telephone-answering practices provide another occasion for displaying (or withholding) cues to ethnic category membership. In Cluj, as is the case elsewhere in Romania, most Romanians answer the phone with alo or da (yes). In Hungary, most Hungarians answer the phone with hallo (pronounced in a manner clearly distinct from the Romanian alo) or else with igen (yes) or tessék (roughly “go ahead”). In Cluj, however, some Hungarians answer the phone in the “Romanian” manner, while others, along with a few Romanians (generally “old Clujeni”) use an intermediate form, halo, in which the vowels are pronounced as in the Romanian alo, but with an initial “h” as in the Hungarian hallo. This is another manifestation of the asymmetries discussed above. Answering the phone in the Hungarian manner marks the speaker as Hungarian; but answering in the Romanian manner does not, in general, mark the speaker as Romanian (since Romanian is the default language). Answering the phone with the Romanian alo or the intermediate halo can be another way for Hungarians to undercommunicate their ethnicity. However, it is more often simply a matter of habit, a default local practice adopted without any intention of downplaying ethnic category membership. 40 41

See chapter 8, pp. 243ff. See chapter 8, pp. 250–51.

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On the other hand, many Hungarians routinely answer the phone with hallo, igen, or tessék.42 The phone is used primarily for conversation among family and friends, and the world of family and friends is, for most Hungarians, a largely intraethnic world, a specifically Hungarian world nested within the wider Romanian world. Within the confines of this world, it may be expected that one answer the phone in a “Hungarian” manner. When Fox, in the course of an extended stay in town, answered his phone with da, Kati, with whom he ordinarily spoke Hungarian, replied, only half-jokingly, “Jesus Christ, you’ve become Romanian again!” This is another example of a local reversal of the relation between Hungarian and Romanian in the wider setting.

Doing Things with Categories The interactional dimension of ethnic categorization goes well beyond overcommunicating or undercommunicating one’s ethnicity to strangers. Categorization is not simply a matter of the deployment and decoding of cues: it is not simply a matter of conveying or discerning new information about a previously unknown ethnic category membership. Identifying oneself, a co-participant, or a third party in ethnic terms can also serve to make a previously known category membership relevant in a particular interactional context. We identify here several ways in which ethnicity, as a discursive resource, can be mobilized for specific interactional purposes.43 All of these highlight the centrality of accountability to the everyday workings of ethnicity.44 Ethnic category membership can be invoked to account for—to explain, justify, or excuse—an action, stance, or opinion (one’s own or another’s); to hold others accountable for actions or stances imputable to them as category members; to establish one’s standing as an “insider” in order to criticize fellow category members or to advocate an unorthodox, controversial, or potentially discrediting view; to account 42 Of twenty-four numbers we called that were listed in the telephone book under identifiably Hungarian names, eleven answered in an unambiguously Hungarian manner (ten with hallo and one with igen); nine answered with the intermediate form halo; and four answered with identifiably Romanian forms (three with alo and one with da), though two of these four were probably Romanian, judging from their accent. 43 For analyses of the enactment of identities in talk, from a perspective broadly informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, see the papers collected in Antaki and Widdicombe, eds., Identities in Talk, and Hester and Housley, eds., Language, Interaction, and National Identity. See also Hansen, “A Practical Task,” which includes a brief survey of work in the field of language and social interaction that bears on the understanding of ethnicity as a situated practical accomplishment (pp. 63–68). 44 On accountability, see Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, vii, 1; Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, esp. chapters 6 and 7.

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for an unexpected category membership of a third party; to police the boundaries of a category; or to mark or qualify membership status. We consider each of these actions in turn. Accounting for a Stance We begin with two utterly straightforward, even banal examples of the invocation of ethnicity to explain a stance. Erika, a twenty-something Hungarian bartender at the Music Pub, is largely indifferent to nationalist politics. But when asked whether she wanted her daughter to continue on from the Hungarian-language preschool she was attending to a Hungarian elementary school, she replied simply, “Yes, because I’m Hungarian.” Similarly, when Gyuri was asked what kind of high school his younger son would be attending, he replied, “Well, that’s the problem, I’m Hungarian, and my wife’s Romanian,” offering this as a sufficient explanation for their diverging views on the issue. Although ethnicity is expressly invoked in these examples, the significance of this sort of account is that it is ordinarily unarticulated. Category membership is seldom made explicit in accounting for a stance in such straightforward ways. Explicit accounts like those cited here are produced for the most part only when taken-for-granted background understandings and expectations are breached. For many Hungarians, being asked about school choice constitutes such a breach—precisely because it is ordinarily taken for granted, in intra-Hungarian interaction, that children should attend Hungarian schools.45 We focus here on explicit invocations of ethnic category membership, but we need to keep in mind the power of unarticulated, taken-for-granted understandings as well. In a casual conversation with a taxi driver, Brubaker and Grancea asked how he liked the town. Having lived there for fifty-eight years, he countered sardonically, how could he not like it? “Things ought to look better around here. . . . What can I say? Especially as I’m Hungarian. And that says it all, doesn’t it?” Here again, ethnic category membership is offered—quite explicitly—as a sufficient explanation for his disillusionment, though the driver went on to specify Funar’s shenanigans, for which the town had become notorious. Once again, this kind of account is seldom made explicit. The driver no doubt recognized us as foreigners, or at least as outsiders; it is unlikely that he would have spoken in this manner to a local. But like the assumptions about Hungarian-language schooling, this ethnically inflected stance toward the town under Mayor Funar is no less important for being ordinarily unarticulated. 45

On the taken-for-grantedness of Hungarian-language education, see chapter 9, pp. 272ff.

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Holding Others Accountable Ethnonational category membership can be invoked to hold others accountable for actions or stances that are in some way attributable or “imputable” to them as category members, or for which they can be expected to answer as category members, even though the actions were not done by them as individuals. An example, discussed above in a different context, is Veronika’s complaint of being treated by her Romanian high school classmates as a representative Hungarian in certain contexts despite her self-understanding as a Romanian.46 What is interesting here is not that she was treated as Hungarian, but how she was so treated. Her classmates would repeatedly ask her “why the Hungarians want Transylvania back,” in effect holding her accountable for the revisionist political stance believed characteristic of Hungarians. Another example of ethnic accountability comes from a group discussion in which Mia, a Romanian factory worker, described a conversation with Ildi, her Hungarian colleague, who had complained that Hungarians had been discriminated against under communism. Mia, who felt strongly that things had been just as bad for Romanians, recalled— indeed re-enacted—her outrage at this unwarranted complaint: “How can you [singular “you,” that is, “you, Ildi”] claim such things? [ . . . ] How can you [plural “you,” that is, “you Hungarians”] claim such things?” The two-part formulation of the counter-complaint showed that Mia held Ildi accountable as a Hungarian for her unjustified complaint. By re-enacting her counter-complaint twice with identical words, except for a crucial shift from second-person singular to second-person plural, Mia’s formulation grammatically marked this double aspect of accountability, individual and categorical. Invoking Insider Status Category membership can be invoked to establish one’s right to criticize fellow category members as an “insider.” Complaining about Mayor Funar, a retired lawyer explained that he did so as a Romanian: “Both what he says and what he does bother me. As a Romanian, mind you, as a Romanian. And as a citizen of Cluj.” A similar stance was adopted by a retired engineer: “Now, the fact that Funar does everything in his power to ruin relations between Romanians and Hungarians, that’s something that I, as a Romanian, cannot agree with.” For both, invoking their category membership was a way of claiming legitimacy for their criticisms of the mayor’s nationalist politics. Speaking “as Romanians” 46

See p. 214.

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gave them “standing” to criticize Funar from the inside, as members of the very category in the name of which Funar claimed to speak and act.47 By speaking as a Romanian, Funar exposed other Romanians to accountability, as Romanians, for what he said and did ( just as Veronika, as we saw above, could be held accountable, as a Hungarian— although she did not understand herself in this way—for what “the Hungarians” were believed to want). In the examples presented here, it is partly because they could be held accountable, as Romanians, for Funar, that these Romanian Clujeni claimed the right, as Romanians, to criticize him. The category “Romanian,” as we have observed, can be understood in terms of citizenship as well as ethnicity. One thirty-something Hungarian sales representative, who was married to a Romanian, claimed membership in the civic category “Romanian” to express in the strongest possible terms his feeling of being fed up with Romania: “Screw Romania, then! And I say this as a Romanian, not as a Hungarian. As a Romanian, because I consider myself Romanian, I was born in Romania.” Speaking as a Romanian was a way of claiming “standing” to voice his frustration with Romania. Asserting one’s status as a category member in good standing can be a way of securing a license to adopt an unorthodox, controversial, or potentially discrediting or disqualifying view. This can pre-empt criticism that might arise from adopting an opinion or undertaking an action at variance with what can ordinarily legitimately be expected of a member of the category—criticism that might otherwise call one’s membership status into question. Controversial assertions are often prefaced with a marked assertion of insider status: “I consider myself RomanianRomanian [that is, purely Romanian],” said one taxi driver. “As far as I know, my ancestors are Romanian all the way back. But I think it would be better for Transylvania to be autonomous from Bucharest. That would be better.”48 Accounting for Unexpected Category Memberships There is a standard phrase in Hungarian—Román, de rendes—that means roughly “He’s Romanian, but he’s all right,” and a precisely analogous phrase in Romanian: Ungur, dar de treaba˘ (“He’s Hungarian, but he’s all right”). A straightforward example of the Hungarian variant was 47 Both speakers quoted here were married to Hungarians. Their insistence that they were speaking as Romanians may have had the additional function of serving to pre-emptively “shore up” their potentially dubious membership status—to pre-empt possible attempts to call their category membership into question. 48 For another example, see pp. 236–37.

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observed by Brubaker in the context of a family discussion: a young Hungarian woman, describing a local business to her father, characterized it as “a Romanian firm [meaning, in this context, a firm run by ethnic Romanians], but apparently quite good.” The key word here, of course, is “but,” which points to a deep structure of commonsense expectation. Yet the expectation is not necessarily—as the preceding example might suggest—that the expected reference to a Romanian (by a Hungarian) or to a Hungarian (by a Romanian) would ordinarily be negative or pejorative. The “but” in such phrases does not necessarily signal this kind of evaluative reversal. It marks, rather, the fact that an unexpected categorical reference requires an account. It is not the positive assessment that is unexpected (and therefore accountable); it is the reference to a Romanian in a context in which one would have expected reference to a Hungarian, or vice versa. In a discussion of her workplace—a neighborhood grocery store— Karcsi’s granddaughter Ági was asked if the owner was Hungarian. “Well,” she replied, “his wife is half-Hungarian, he’s Romanian, but there was never any problem that you were Hungarian or Romanian. He actually likes Hungarians better than Romanians [laughs].” The way the question was posed, and the context in which it was posed (an interview conducted in Hungarian) had projected Hungarian as the expected answer; this made relevant Ági’s account for his being Romanian. Another example comes from a conversation in which a Hungarian man was describing his experience at the time of the 1990 violence in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. “When we went out, an acquaintance of ours—we got along well, he was Romanian but we got along well, he speaks Hungarian and so does his wife—he said, ‘Don’t go there, think what might happen to you.’ I said, ‘What will happen to us? If we meet Romanians we’ll speak Romanian, if we meet Hungarians we’ll speak Hungarian.’ ” The amicable reference to a Romanian was unexpected in the context of a description of the Romanian-Hungarian violence; this made relevant an account, in which it was emphasized that this was no ordinary Romanian, and certainly not the sort of Romanian who was implicated in the violence, but rather one who spoke Hungarian, as did his wife, and with whom the speaker got along well. The following example, though it does not involve an explicit “but,” illustrates the need to account for an unexpected reference to the ethnonational category membership of a third party. In 1997, Gyuri—the Hungarian taxi driver we introduced in the preceding chapter—was telling us about the forthcoming wedding of his daughter from his first marriage. The couple, he said, would live in Cluj, but the wedding would take place in a “purely Romanian” village, and the groom was Romanian. Gyuri immediately added, as if an explanation were needed,

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that “it doesn’t matter that her husband’s Romanian, my own wife is Romanian, all that matters is that they love each other.” Even as Gyuri says one thing—that category membership does not matter—he shows something quite different: that category membership does matter, and that the violation of the expectation of endogamy requires an account. Policing Category Membership Ethnicity is generally understood as an ascribed status, but in significant respects it is “achieved.”49 Ethnic category membership is contingent on recognition by others; and that recognition can be withheld. Membership has its privileges; but it also has its obligations, if one is to remain a member in good standing, or even—since membership depends on recognition by others—a member at all. Precisely what these obligations are is nowhere spelled out. The nature of the obligations becomes visible only when they are violated, and when that violation is “policed.”50 Policing works differently for Hungarians and Romanians. “Hungarian” is a more “achieved” status than “Romanian”—and therefore one more vulnerable and more “policeable.” One can in effect lose one’s status as a “Hungarian.” Karcsi’s granddaughter Ági recalled that some Hungarian children had treated her as an outsider because she attended a Romanian elementary school; they called her a “Romanian” and told her to “go back to the Romanians.” But while one can be a bad Romanian—a traitor—one cannot lose one’s status as a Romanian the same way as one can one’s status as a Hungarian. Policing of category membership—effected through the monitoring of language knowledge, language practices, school choice, and mixed marriages—is much stronger in the Hungarian case.51 The “achieved” nature of Hungarianness is suggested by the following description of a man by his ex-wife, which begins by characterizing him in objectivist, ascriptive terms but ends by focusing on how he lives: He’s half-Hungarian, half-Romanian. His mother was Romanian, his father was Hungarian, a Hungarian history teacher. The mother did not know a word of Hungarian. They fell in love, got married, 49 On achieved and ascribed statuses, see Linton, The Study of Man, 115ff. On the achieved, contingent, ongoing process of becoming (and continuing to be) recognized as an American Indian by other American Indians, see Wieder and Pratt, “On Being a Recognizable Indian.” 50 For a discussion of the dynamics of internal “policing” within minority and, more specifically, “marginal” populations, focusing on marginal elites’ efforts to monitor and prevent the assimilation of non-elites, see Laitin, “Marginality,” 39–41. 51 Policing need not be dramatic, confrontational, or direct; it does not require saying something like “What kind of Hungarian are you?” Simply asking if a child of a mixed marriage speaks Hungarian can be a form of everyday policing. For a discussion of intra-Hungarian policing of language practices, see chapter 8, pp. 260–62.

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and had two kids. And they raised them as Hungarians. The mother learned Hungarian along with the kids. I got to know Tibor only as a Hungarian. Only after some time did I learn that his mother was Romanian. He really turned into a Hungarian. [ . . . ] He really is Hungarian. He lives as a Hungarian. The conclusion—“He lives as a Hungarian”—suggests the achieved character of Hungarianness, a status that one has to “live up” to. In Romania, the phrase “he lives as a Romanian” would sound decidedly odd. Of course this is not a typical case, since it concerns someone of ethnically mixed parentage. Romanianness, too, can be an achieved quality for children growing up in mixed families. Yet “Hungarian” remains a more pervasively “achieved” category membership. Children from mixed families can more easily and unselfconsciously “gravitate” into becoming Romanian—as the default category—than into becoming Hungarian. Moreover, Hungarian is an achieved status, a status vulnerable to policing, not only for those born of mixed marriages, but for all Hungarians. Policing the category “Romanian” is a more limited enterprise, focused mainly on actions and opinions deemed inappropriate or disqualifying for a member of the category. Supporting Transylvanian independence—or more extreme still, the return of Transylvania to Hungarian control—is an example: “There is no Romanian, no Romanian in his right mind, who would want it,” as Emilia, the retired teacher, put it in a group discussion. Yet even this heretical opinion, as we will see below, can be advanced by pre-emptively asserting one’s Romanianness. Marking Membership We ordinarily think of ethnic categories as discrete and bounded: one either is or is not a member. We often imagine ethnic and other categories in spatial terms, as bounded regions with a clear distinction between inside and outside. Yet in practice, ethnic category membership is often understood, experienced, and represented as a matter of degree; as anthropologist Thomas Eriksen has put it, it is better understood as an analogic, not a digital phenomenon.52 Category membership can be marked or qualified in all kinds of ways. Honorific distinctions—of authenticity, antiquity, purity, or intensity— can be claimed for oneself or bestowed upon others. A person can be characterized as a true Hungarian (igazi magyar); a real Romanian (romaˆn adeva˘rat); a pure Hungarian (tiszta magyar); a Romanian Romanian (romaˆn-romaˆn); “very” Hungarian (nagyon magyar); a genuine Romanian (romaˆn get-beget); a “big” Hungarian (nagy magyar); a pas52

T. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 157–58.

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sionate Romanian (romaˆn înfla˘ca˘rat). In an interview with a Hungarian, a young DAHR member was referred to with admiration—but also singled out as an exception—as one “who lives and dies for Hungariandom.” (These same distinctions, of course, can also be disputed or denied, which shades over into the “policing” practices discussed above.) These qualifiers can be used not only in a “straight” way, to claim or bestow ethnic honor, but also in a critical, subversive, distancing, deflationary, or ironic manner.53 Commenting in a group discussion on the reciprocal dependence of Hungarian and Romanian nationalists on one another, for example, a young worker at the Hungarian theater complained that “the Hungarians who are [really] Hungarian—they’re the ones who make it out to be our national obligation to join the DAHR.” Here those who present themselves as “real” Hungarians are treated as “they” and distinguished from “us.” Or consider this excerpt from another group discussion: “The mayor’s Romanian,” snorted Marcel, a twenty-one-year-old student, dismissively. “Well, we’re also Romanians, but this guy’s too Romanian.” Liviu, a worker in his mid-twenties, then jumped in, repeating the previous comment, with a slight elaboration, while the others laughed: “I’m also Romanian, but this guy’s way too Romanian. I think he’s gone mad.” Such ironic or distancing uses of marked categories can subvert or challenge assumptions about how category members should behave.

Ethnic and Regional Categories Ethnicity, we have argued, works in and through categories. But through what categories does it work? This might seem a trivial question: ethnicity, it might be thought, obviously works through ethnic categories. But what is an ethnic category? As we have seen, this is not always unambiguous. The category “Romanian,” for example, can refer to ethnicity or ethnocultural nationality, but it can also refer to citizenship and, more diffusely, to “country.” Moreover, ethnicity often works through pronouns, or through other so-called indexical expressions, the meaning of which depends on the context. Thus noi/mi (we) or la noi/nálunk (here, at our place, or “with us,” as in “with us, it’s a matter of . . .”) can have an ethnic meaning, but can also refer to Romania as a whole, to region or locality, or to any number of other context-specific understandings of “we” that have nothing to do with ethnicity or citizenship.54 53 On ethnic honor as a specifically mass form of honor, claimable by all members of an ethnic category, see Weber, Economy and Society, 390–91. 54 On the ways in which the use of indexical expressions such as “we” and “us” in political rhetoric can serve to reproduce nationhood, see Billig, Banal Nationalism, 105–9. On the way in which pronouns can do both ethnic and non-ethnic work, even in the course of a single utterance, see p. 238.

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In our discussion of cues, we noted that ethnonational category membership can be conveyed or suggested through the use of other categories. Given the close historical and contemporary association between religion and ethnicity in Transylvania, to know someone’s religion is, in most cases, to know her ethnicity (though the reverse does not hold); this commonsense social knowledge makes it possible to invoke ethnicity by referring to religion. Similarly, one can invoke ethnicity by using a regional origin category such as “Szekler,” “Oltenian,” or “Moldavian” (or a city origin category such as “Bucures¸tean”), or simply by referring to place of origin (to a region, county, town, or even village). To refer to someone as a Szekler is to convey that the person is Hungarian;55 to refer to someone as an “Oltenian,” “Moldavian,” or “Bucures¸tean” is to convey that he or she is Romanian. (Not all regional categories convey ethnicity: “Transylvanian,” in particular, does not.)56 Regional categories are especially interesting for our purposes because they not only convey ethnicity but function like ethnic categories.57 Both refer to cultural and behavioral differences that are presumed to be acquired in the family and transmitted, if not by biological descent, then by early socialization. Both convey commonsense stereotypical knowledge of the basic “nature” of certain “kinds” of people.58 The commonsense knowledge conveyed by regional categories tends, moreover, to be linked to differences in bodies; it is in fact more closely linked to bodily differences than knowledge conveyed by the categories “Hungarian” and “Romanian.” Insofar as embodiment is linked to a sense of common origin and descent, one could even say that regional categories are more “ethnic,” or more racialized, than ethnonational categories. Regional differences are often cast in civilizational terms, as in this excerpt from a discussion group involving young Romanian men: Alin: I think everybody around here feels some . . . S¸tefan: //Dread. Alin: //uneasiness when they cross over, to Bucharest or to the southern part. All Transylvanians. Liviu: That’s true. And we were influenced by the Hungarians //in a positive way. Alin: //Yeah. 55 In certain contexts, to characterize someone as Szekler is not only to convey that the person is Hungarian, but also to suggest that she is a particularly Hungarian Hungarian. That is, “Szekler” can function as a marked subcategory of “Hungarian,” just as “Mot¸” can function as a marked subcategory of “Romanian”: see pp. 236–37, below. 56 On the category “Transylvanian,” see note 62, p. 234, below. 57 On Maramures¸ as a Romanian regional identity in some ways comparable to ethnicity, see Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead, 278. 58 On the widespread tendency to divide people into putatively deeply rooted “intrinsic kinds,” see Hirschfeld, Race in the Making. On ethnic and regional stereotypes in Transylvania, see Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 76–84.

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S¸tefan: Yeah, that was a good thing for Transylvania. So in effect Hungarians through Germans brought civilization to us. You go over there, south of the Carpathians, those guys still live in the same hut with their pig, but that’s not a problem for them. Liviu: Their houses are made of clay. Although the idea of a civilizational divide is put most crudely by the high school-educated S¸tefan and Liviu, it is articulated by Alin, a university student, as well.59 Transcarpathian regional comparisons are often racialized as well, most commonly via references to southerners’ “dark” complexion and through their association with Roma (or Gypsies [t¸igani, cigányok], as they are overwhelmingly referred to in ordinary conversation).60 Such references occurred in numerous Romanian group discussions. As a twenty-year-old Romanian put it in one group, southerners are “a different kind of people. Look at the ones that sell melons [at the market], you’d think they were Gypsies.” Here embodied differences are implicit in the association of southerners with Gypsies, who are “known” to be “dark.” On other occasions, bodily markers of difference are made explicit. The following example comes from a group of young educated Romanians, who were discussing how Romanians had acquired a stigmatized image abroad:61 Virgil: They say Romanians are thieves but the truth is that where they can get work abroad they’re praised. Damian: They really //work. Virgil: //Of course, there are the Roma, Damian: The Gypsies, they’re the problem! Virgil: Yeah, the Gypsies, //who Damian: //They’re the ones who ruined things. Virgil: Or the Romanians from Ploies¸ti who are very dark but they’re called //“Romanians” [sarcastic] All: //[laughter] Damian: Yeah right, they’re Gypsies, too. Here, the participants start by treating Gypsies and southern Romanians as interchangeable categories and then go further, denying southerners the quality of Romanians, and demoting them to the status of 59 For “civilizational” understandings of regional differences in relation to the question of regional autonomy, see chapter 12, pp. 347–48. 60 Roma are subjected to severe discrimination, and are a highly stigmatized category, in Romania, as throughout Eastern Europe (see for example Kligman, “On the Social Construction of ‘Otherness’ ”). The data quoted below are typical of casually stigmatizing references. The point to be underscored here is that these casually stigmatizing references commonly extend, among Transylvanian Romanians, to “southerners.” 61 We return to this theme in chapter 11, pp. 321ff.

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Gypsies. In the Romanian group discussion from which we quoted in the previous paragraph, phenotypical and putative civilizational differences—skin color and cleanliness—were expressly linked by S¸tefan, a twenty-year-old high school graduate who had worked in a series of odd jobs: “You have no business going there [down south], they spot you right away cause you’re whiter than they are and [they’ll say] ‘This guy’s too clean, he’s not from around here.’ ” A university-educated young man in another Romanian group discussion noted that “even the Gypsies are different [that is, better] in Transylvania—seriously, I mean it,” and others concurred. If deep-seated regional differences rubbed off “even” on Gypsies, this spoke volumes about the magnitude of the taken-for-granted difference between Transylvanians and southerners. For Transylvanians, Hungarian and Romanian, regional categories organize quite similar bodies of commonsense stereotypical “knowledge.” Transylvanians commonly hold southerners and Moldavians to be uncivilized, lazy, and unreliable. Yet the invocation of regional categories works in different ways for Hungarians and Romanians. For Transylvanian Romanians, regional categories—southern or Transylvanian—cut across and relativize national ones, highlighting ethnoracial, ethnocultural, and sometimes ethnoreligious differences within the larger ethnolinguistically based national category. The following exchange from a group discussion of middle-aged workers begins with city categories, then shifts to regional categories, treating both Transylvanians and southerners as a kind of ethnicity, belonging in a category set along with “Germans”:62 Marian: If we go, for example, if Clujeni go to Bucharest and we see how people behave there, //it’s— Marinela: //it’s different. Marian: It’s really different from those [people] from . . . //from Transylvania. Grigore: //But let’s not talk only about behavior, it’s a question of culture, of the standard of living, of whatever. 62 “Transylvanian” figures less often as an explicit category than as an implicit point of comparative reference when southern or other regional categories are invoked. It is the regional “others” (Oltenians, Moldavians, Bucures¸teni, “southerners”), not the Transylvanian “self,” who are expressly treated as “kinds” of people. Like southern and other regional categories, “Transylvanian” can work to relativize the Hungarian-Romanian opposition; indeed it does so more directly, for it is an implicitly (or occasionally explicitly) transethnic category. At the same time, “Transylvanian” (like southern and other regional categories) works as an ethnic category, organizing knowledge of and sentiment toward a putative common culture, way of life, and mentality. We heard occasional explicit reference to “the Transylvanian people” from both Hungarians and Romanians. As a taxi driver in his mid-thirties put it, “We Transylvanians are perhaps the most—or one of the most—Western peoples [of Romania]. I mean as a people.”

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Marian: //Yes. Grigore: //They’re 150 years behind. Lidia: I don’t think you can say that about salaries. Grigore: No! Not about salaries, but in terms of culture, civilization, and standard of living, Lidia: //Yes. Grigore: //they’re as far behind us as we are from the Germans, that’s where the southerners are, this is all too clear, it doesn’t matter that it might offend someone. Claudiu also put “southerners” into an ethnic series along with Hungarians: “As a way of being, there are more differences between us [Transylvanian Romanians] and the southerners than between us and Hungarians.” So did a student in a group discussion: “I feel I’m closer to a Hungarian than to an Oltenian because Hungarians I can actually rely on, we understand each other.” For Hungarians, regional categories can work in this way, to relativize ethnonational differences by highlighting the differences between Transylvanian and Transcarpathian Romanians and commonalities between Transylvanian Romanians and Hungarians. This was expressed most explicitly in an exchange between two female Hungarian office workers in their thirties. The immediate context was a sequence of stories about “good Romanians,” that is, those well disposed to Hungarians: Ibolya: But the Cluj-born Romanians [ . . . ] they’re Transylvanian. Emese: And they can //speak Hun— Ibolya: //They are not Romanians and they are not Hungarians, those are Transylvanians. And they respect a Hungarian just as they respect themselves. I’m talking about people above a certain level now. As for the others, they just call you bozgor [an ethnic slur] and that’s it. . . . When you ask them, “Where was your grandfather born?” and they say, “In Suceava” [in Moldavia] then that’s it. But when they say here in Cluj, then you know— it’s not just that you know, you can tell by the way they behave that they know where they belong, themselves and the others, and they don’t hate another just because they’re Hungarian. But regional categories can also work to reinforce rather than to relativize ethnonational oppositions. Southerners or Moldavians can be taken as prototypical representatives of the larger Romanian ethnonational category, and stereotypical “knowledge” about them may come to govern what is “known” about “Romanians.” In this case, the broader ethnonational category “Romanian” can be devalued by its association

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with its stigmatized regional subcategories; a stigmatized part comes to stand for the whole. For Transylvanian Romanians, in everyday contexts, “ethnic” antagonisms may follow ethnoregional as much as ethnonational fault lines. Southerners may be as significant and salient an “other” as Hungarians, and are probably more likely to be invoked spontaneously in everyday contexts (though not, to be sure, in political contexts). For Hungarians, by contrast, ethnic nationality is more salient than region. This is another manifestation of the asymmetries discussed above. The complex relation—and family resemblance—between regional and ethnonational categories is illustrated in the following excerpt from a Romanian group discussion. Regional categories in this fragment both stand for larger ethnonational categories and relativize the force of ethnonational categories by functioning as ethnic categories in their own right. The main protagonists in this exchange are Vasile and Eugen, both salesmen in their mid-thirties with high school education. Vasile: Excuse me for interrupting, but I’ve reached the point where I sometimes say I wouldn’t mind if Transylvania went to Hungary, lock, stock, and barrel. Valentin: Right! Dorina: [laughter] Vasile: Me, a true Mot¸, T_____ is my [family] name, I’m from //the Apuseni [mountains]. Eugen: //I wanted to sell Transylvania but couldn’t find a buyer. //I would’ve sold it by now. Vasile: //And you know why? Look at their [Hungary’s] progress, even Bulgaria passed us already a couple of years ago, and [laughing] even Albanians will get there soon. [...] Vasile: [ . . . ] If you consider the whole country, it’s Transylvania that supports all these lazy Moldavians, who are all lazy— I hope //you’re not Moldavian. Eugen: //But why are Moldavians //lazy? Vasile: //I really hate Oltenians, Moldavians, southerners. Eugen: Why should you hate them? You see, you’re more of a chauvinist than I am. I’m more chauvinist as a Romanian but you . . . Dorina: [laughter] Vasile: For my part, I’d put up a fence on the other side of the Carpathians, so they would stay there, and you know what? They’d be starving! Dorina: Yes.

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Vasile: They’d be starving there. Eugen: That’s what you think. As part of a longer discussion of Romania’s floundering economy, Vasile interrupts to vent his frustration. He voices what is, for a Romanian, a heretical opinion, and then pre-emptively asserts his arch-Romanianness. He does so not directly, but indirectly, by asserting a marked regional identity (he is from the T¸ara Mot¸ilor [Mot¸ country], understood as one of the most authentically Romanian regions, equivalent, perhaps, to the Scottish Highlands) in a marked manner (he claims to be a “true Mot¸” and backs up this claim by specifying his family name and his birthplace, the Apuseni mountains). The Mot¸i are known as “pure” Romanians and, historically, as staunch and defiant adversaries of Hungarians; by identifying as a Mot¸, Vasile tries to prevent his scandalously unorthodox position from being used to challenge his Romanianness. Ignoring Eugen’s ironic interposition—“I wanted to sell Transylvania but couldn’t find a buyer”—Vasile goes on to explain his stance, noting that neighboring countries have fared much better economically, and that Transylvania is weighed down by having to support “lazy Moldavians,” whom he “hates” along with “Oltenians” and “southerners” in general. Now the operative category set is not ethnocultural nationality but region. The category “Transylvanian” is not explicitly formulated, but it is as a Transylvanian that Vasile voices his antipathy toward regional “others.” Regional categories work here like ethnocultural categories in the way they organize knowledge and sentiment. Thus Eugen observes that Vasile is “more of a chauvinist than I am. I’m more chauvinist as a Romanian [emphasis added] but you . . .” Eugen treats Vasile’s “regional chauvinism” as comparable to his own avowed ethnonational chauvinism. Two sides of the relation between regional and ethnocultural categories are illustrated here. On the one hand, the excerpt shows how a regional category—Mot¸—can function to invoke ethnonational category membership at its strongest and most “authentic.” On the other hand, it shows how regional and ethnonational categories can function as competing and cross-cutting categories of the same order, organizing knowledge and sentiment in formally similar but substantively different ways. Depending on how regional categories are deployed and understood, they can either reinforce or subvert ethnonational categories.

Conclusion Ethnicity operates in and through countless acts of categorization; but not all categorization is ethnic. Categorization is ubiquitous; ethnic categorization is not. The social world teems with all kinds of categories, ar-

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rayed in all kinds of category-sets; ethnicity is only one among many. To study ethnic categories alone—or even in conjunction with closely related categories like citizenship, region, and religion—is to risk contributing to the very reification of ethnicity that the strategy of beginning with categories rather than groups was designed to avoid. To highlight the imbrication of ethnic and non-ethnic modes of everyday categorization, we conclude with a short excerpt from a conversation in which a loquacious middle-aged Romanian begins by talking about what it would take for Romania to “become part of Europe”: All of us have to learn a lot more languages, if we ever want to become part of Europe. But the way things are going around here, it’ll be very difficult. I mean, it’s hard to get there when we are so uncivilized. When there is no— when Romanians fight each other, insult each other, there are lots of Gypsies, Hungarians and Romanians quarrel all the time. But it doesn’t start from us, from below. Those on top do it. Because we— among us, on the streets [that is, in everyday life], we never have problems like “You’re Romanian or Hungarian,” that sort of thing doesn’t come up. It’s those on top who stir up all these things. At the outset, “all of us” and “we” refer to Romanian citizens, and “around here” (literally “with us”) refers to the country as a whole. When the category “Romanians” is first expressly introduced, it, too, refers to Romanian citizens, whose “uncivilized” behavior hinders the country’s chances of “becoming part of Europe.” But the specification of the “uncivilized” behavior—“Romanians fight each other, insult each other”— segues directly into ethnicity, evoking first “Gypsies,” then “Hungarians and Romanians,” with “Romanian” now understood in ethnic terms. The ethnonational categories “Hungarian” and “Romanian” are not introduced in a we/they frame, and the reference is neutral and evenhanded: both are presented in the third person. Although the speaker is a Romanian, he does not identify here as a Romanian. The we/they distinction that is introduced in the following sentence is not ethnic but stratificational and political. Those responsible for the quarrels between Romanians and Hungarians are not ordinary people, not people “on the streets,” but “those on top.” Stratification categories cut across ethnic ones; like regional categories, they can be used to relativize ethnic differences. Ethnicity is “happening” here, but by no means ethnicity alone.63 63 For a more complex example of the emergence of ethnic nationalism in interaction through a gradual turn-by-turn shift from political and economic categories through region and country to an explicit affirmation of nationalism, see appendix A, “An Example of the Interactional Emergence of Nationalism.”

Chapter 8




LANGUAGES

In transylvania, as throughout most of East Central Europe, ethnocultural nationality is defined in the first instance by language.1 Intergenerational shifts in mother tongue are understood to entail shifts in ethnocultural nationality as well, for language is more important, as a criterion of nationality, than descent. Regardless of one’s ancestry, or one’s religion, one cannot be socially recognized as Hungarian without speaking Hungarian.2 Because language is the decisive criterion of ethnonational belonging, it is also the central focus of ethnopolitical contention. One might therefore think that language would make ethnicity pervasively relevant to everyday interaction, and that everyday language practices would be a site of chronic contestation and conflict. Language is an important vehicle for everyday ethnicity in Cluj, and it is an important though intermittent site of friction. But we do not wish to suggest that language makes ethnicity omnirelevant to everyday experience, or that interethnic interaction is continuously fraught with the potential for conflict. Nor can one assume that speaking Hungarian is a form of resistance to Romanian nationalism, or that decisions about what language to speak are always charged with political meaning.3 Ethnopolitical conflict over language is not continuously 1 In some settings, religion has been more important than language as a constitutive criterion of nationality. The early twentieth-century population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, for example, were carried out on the basis of religion, not language; and in the former Yugoslavia, distinctions of “nationality” between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims (the latter being an official designation of nationality) were understood to be based on religious affiliation, not language (though in the aftermath of the breakup of the state, language codification programs sponsored by successor state governments have attempted to establish Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as distinct languages). 2 Criteria for being recognized as Romanian (in Romania) are more complicated, because of the conflation of citizenship and ethnocultural nationality that we discussed in the preceding chapter. One cannot be socially recognized as Romanian by ethnocultural nationality, though, without speaking Romanian as one’s native language. 3 In some bilingual settings, language choice in a wide range of everyday contexts is more fraught with political significance than is the case in postcommunist Cluj. In the Baltic republics during the late Soviet period, for example, pretending not to understand Russian in everyday transactions in stores and other settings was a not-uncommon form of everyday resistance to Soviet rule. Everyday interaction was similarly fraught in Montreal in the late 1970s; see for example Heller, “Negotiations of Language Choice.” Other language practices, too, can serve as vehicles for resistance; see for example Gal, “Language and Political Economy,” 354, on the use of nonstandard variants to demonstrate solidarity; or Rampton, “Youth, Race, and Resistance,” on the deployment of accents by British-born students of Indian origin in British high schools.

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reproduced in everyday experience, though it does sometimes inform that experience. We address here the ways in which ethnicity is enacted and experienced through language practices in a sociolinguistic setting of asymmetrical bilingualism. Asymmetry was a key theme in our discussion of categories, and it will be central to our discussion of languages as well. RomanianHungarian bilingualism in Cluj is asymmetrical in four respects.4 First, only part of the population is bilingual. Like linguistic minorities in other settings, almost all Hungarians are bilingual, while very few Romanians, especially among the younger generation, know Hungarian.5 Second, the asymmetrical distribution of bilingualism reflects a fundamental political and demographic asymmetry.6 In a unitary nation-state, with a single official language that is the native language of over 90 percent of the population of the state (and of about 80 percent of the population of Cluj), it is scarcely surprising that almost all Cluj Hungarians know Romanian, and few Romanians Hungarian.7 Before World War I, when Hungary ruled Transylvania, and Hungarians comprised the large majority of the town’s inhabitants, the asymmetry was reversed: then, almost all Romanians in town knew Hungarian, while virtually no Hungarians knew Romanian.8 Third, the political and demographic asymmetry gives rise not only to asymmetric competencies, but also to asymmetric understandings of language and differing norms and expectations concerning appropriate linguistic behavior. This is the domain of what sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have called “language ideology,” broadly understood as encompassing not only discursively articulated views of language but also ordinarily tacit, taken-for-granted assumptions, expectations, and 4 Some Clujeni are bilingual in other languages; many young Romanians, in particular, have a very good command of English (generally better than that of Hungarians, for reasons we discussed in chapter 6 [p. 203n31]). We limit our attention here to Romanian-Hungarian bilingualism; when we refer to Romanian monolinguals, we mean Romanian-speakers who do not speak Hungarian. 5 Hungarian and Romanian are linguistically unrelated: Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric, Romanian a Romance language. Asymmetrical bilingualism therefore works quite differently than it does among speakers of languages that are mutually intelligible (Catalan and Spanish, for example, or Russian and Urkainian). In Cluj, a monolingual Romanian and a bilingual Hungarian do not have the option of conversing bilingually, each using her own native language. 6 See for example Horváth, “Az erdélyi magyarok kétnyelvu ´´sége.” 7 In macroanalytic perspective, what needs explanation is not why bilingualism is asymmetrical in this context, but why it persists at all: how native speakers of Hungarian have been able to reproduce themselves over more than three-quarters of a century of Romanian rule. This is a question we address in chapter 9. 8 The shift from one pattern of asymmetrical bilingualism to another did not, of course, result immediately or automatically from the change in sovereignty. As we indicated in chapter 3, it was the result of a protracted process of nationalization that spanned most of the century. Despite the change in sovereignty, Hungarian remained the prevailing language, outside of official contexts, throughout the interwar period.

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understandings.9 We do not want to suggest that Hungarians’ and Romanians’ expectations about appropriate language use in particular interactional settings are radically discrepant; to the contrary, we will argue that largely convergent expectations about everyday language use make bilingualism for the most part interactionally unproblematic, rather than a constant source of friction or a continuous vehicle of ethnicity. Yet there are some differing norms and expectations that do intermittently generate friction. And when one considers not just specific expectations about language use in particular settings but more general assumptions about language, one finds deep differences in everyday language ideologies, with most Romanians, for example, seeing the primacy of Romanian as only “natural” in Romania, and most Hungarians seeing the use and intergenerational transmission of Hungarian as “natural” for Hungarians. Finally, Hungarian-Romanian bilingualism, like almost all bilingualism, involves differential command over the two languages. “Bilingualism” covers a very large range of situations, from the limiting case of an equal command of both languages to a minimal ability to communicate in specific contexts (such as making purchases at a market) in a second language.10 Perfectly symmetrical bilingualism is rare; even fluent bilinguals generally have a dominant language.11 This is certainly the case in Cluj. Most Hungarians in Cluj speak Romanian reasonably well, many very well; in some contexts (typically those associated with work), many Hungarians speak Romanian more fluently than Hungarian. In the sphere of family and friendship, however, the great majority of Hungarians— including those who carry on their work lives largely or exclusively in Romanian—feel much more comfortable speaking Hungarian.12 Talk is a profoundly embodied activity; and the contrast between the phenomenological ease and comfort involved in speaking one’s native language and the unease or discomfort often felt in speaking a language that is not “one’s own” is central to Hungarians’ experience of ethnicity. 9 On language ideology, see Woolard and Schieffelin, “Language Ideology”; Woolard, “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry”; and Irvine and Gal, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” 10 The prevalence of bilingualism depends of course on the definition adopted; a stricter definition—requiring, for example, an ability to communicate effectively in nonroutine, openended contexts—generates a lower incidence. See for example Laponce, Languages and Their Territories, 24–25. From the large literature on bilingualism and multilingualism, see for overviews J. Edwards, Multilingualism, and Romaine, Bilingualism. On degrees and forms of bilingualism among Transylvanian Hungarians, see Horváth, “Az erdélyi magyarok kétnyelvu´´sége.” The data to which Horváth refers are reported in English in Culic et al., “The Model of Romanian Interethnic Relations,” 268–73. 11 Laponce, Languages and Their Territories, 11–15, 33–34. 12 Exceptions include Hungarians who, through schooling, friendship networks, or marriage, live in a largely Romanian-speaking environment among family and friends as well as at work.

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These linguistic, demographic, and political asymmetries, and the differing language ideologies that they generate, do not automatically make ethnicity pervasively relevant to everyday experience, even for Hungarians. Most of the time, for most Clujeni, language is largely “transparent”; it is a means of communication rather than an object of attention. But there are settings in which language itself—what language is spoken or how it is spoken—is likely to be noticed, discussed, or problematized. We consider four such settings in this chapter: public interaction among strangers, private talk in public places, language choice and codeswitching in mixed company, and the use of Romanian words in Hungarian conversations. In each case we show how language practices— especially the choice of language by Hungarian bilinguals—can make ethnicity “happen.”13 In analyzing the recurrent sociolinguistic settings in which ethnicity is most likely to be enacted or experienced, we give special attention to complaints about and “policing” of language practices. This is not because complaints and policing are omnipresent; they are not. We focus on complaints, and the practices that give rise to them, because they make visible the language norms and expectations that ordinarily remain hidden, and highlight zones of friction and contestation. Our focus here on interactional frictions does not mean that we measure the significance of ethnicity by the prevalence of such frictions. Over the long term, the process of nationalization that has displaced Hungarian from its former centrality to everyday life in Cluj has tended to reduce everyday ethnolinguistic frictions, as Hungarians, for example, have come to take for granted that they will speak Romanian with strangers. The reduction of interactional frictions concerning language use can be read as a sign of linguistic and ethnonational hegemony.14 We were centrally concerned in the first part of the book with this process of nationalization, and with the larger structural forces that have shaped language practices, repertoires, and ideologies. Yet while they provide 13 “Language choice” is actually something of a misnomer. Bilinguals seldom consciously choose what language to speak. Rather, their selection of a language in a particular setting, or at a particular moment—including the switch from one language to another—is regulated in a quasi-automatic manner by an ingrained and embodied sense of what is appropriate, of what feels “normal” or right as opposed to awkward or strained. Language selection and languageswitching are generally governed by what Bourdieu called sens pratique—practical sense or logic of practice—and not by conscious choice. 14 On linguistic hegemony in relation to a broader understanding of symbolic domination, see Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language”; Gal, “Language and Political Economy,” 348. For an analysis of Transylvanian Hungarian bilingualism that is informed by Bourdieu, see Horváth, “Az erdélyi magyarok kétnyelvu´´sége.” Horváth cites survey data indicating that most Transylvanian Hungarians (especially outside the Szekler region) accept as legitimate the primacy of Romanian (and do not view Romanian simply as a language imposed by an oppressive nationalizing state).

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the context for our analysis in this chapter, they are not the immediate object of our analysis. Interaction with Strangers In Cluj, as we observed in the preceding chapter, Romanian is in most settings the unmarked, Hungarian the marked language; and the use of Romanian is expected in public interaction among strangers.15 This expectation—shared by almost all Clujeni, Hungarian as well as Romanian—is both empirical, concerning the probability that Romanian will be used in this setting, and normative, concerning the appropriateness of it being so used.16 Since Hungarians act overwhelmingly in accordance with this expectation, and do not contest (even if they do not always expressly endorse) the appropriateness of addressing strangers in Romanian, the contingencies of asymmetrical bilingualism are regulated—with respect to interaction among strangers—in a manner that generates minimal everyday friction. Occasionally, a Hungarian shop assistant or market vendor may address an unknown customer with the Hungarian tessék instead of (or, more often, in addition to) the Romanian poftit¸i, both meaning in this context roughly, “How can I help you?”17 This does not ordinarily generate friction: most often, the Romanian customer simply replies in Romanian, the shop assistant switches to Romanian, and nothing is made of the opening tessék.18 Sometimes, however, being addressed in Hungarian—if only through the opening tessék—is itself cause for complaint, as in the following (atypical) example. A young Romanian with a high school education defended Funar’s nationalist stance in a group discussion by citing 15 Within the institutionally defined spaces of the “Hungarian world,” with its schools, churches, associations, newspapers, and enterprises (see chapter 9), the relationship between marked and unmarked is reversed, and so, too, is the expectation about what language will be used among strangers. Outside these special institutional spaces, as we saw in the preceding chapter, Hungarians may address a stranger in Hungarian if reliable cues indicate that their interlocutor is Hungarian (though they will usually begin by verifying her identity). 16 Cluj is similar in this respect to Catalonia in the 1970s, as described in Woolard’s exemplary ethnography, Double Talk. At that time, Castilian was the unmarked case, “to be used with all unknown quantities”; Catalan was an insiders’ language, to be used only among Catalans (ibid., 69). Language practices in Catalonia, however, were already changing when Woolard was conducting her fieldwork: as the institutions of the autonomous Catalan polity have strengthened, the use of Catalan in public interaction among strangers has become more widespread. 17 When this happens, it is usually a matter of habit (as in the case of some elderly peasant women selling their produce at the market) or an inadvertent slip, not a deliberate challenge to local language norms. 18 “I have no problem with that,” reported a Romanian university student in a group discussion. The shop assistant “begins in Hungarian, sees you’re Romanian, then speaks Romanian perfectly nicely with you.” It is a different story if the speaker who begins in Hungarian does not

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Hungarian “impudence”: “To walk into a shop and be addressed by the shop-assistant in Hungarian?!” he exclaimed with rhetorical outrage. This had happened to him “many times,” he said, scandalized in particular that Hungarians were “shameless” about this: “They don’t even wait for you to open your mouth to see what language you speak; they just address you in their language.” When Romanians complain of being addressed in Hungarian, it is not ordinarily because they do not understand what is being said. Many Cluj Romanians have some passive knowledge of Hungarian, and almost all would understand the meaning of tessék. A middle-aged seamstress in a Romanian group discussion admitted to feigning incomprehension once when a peasant woman, visiting one of the clinics in town, asked in Hungarian where the pharmacy was. “I was being malicious, I knew what she was asking, but I didn’t want to answer.” In all probability, it was not that the peasant woman would not speak Romanian, but that she could not (as remains the case for some— especially elderly—Hungarians who live in largely Hungarian villages). Yet that incapacity is seldom treated by Romanians as a legitimate excuse for addressing a stranger in Hungarian. It is expected, in other words, not only that one speak Romanian with strangers, but that one be able to do so if one lives in Romania. The inability to speak Romanian, moreover, is often interpreted as a consequence of an unwillingness to learn the language: Traian: [twenty, unemployed] There are still Hungarians in Romania who can’t speak Romanian. And they’ve lived here for fifty or sixty years. Lucia: [twenty-two, student] So what? //Why does that bother you? Traian: //And they don’t want to learn it!19 This complaint testifies to an element of everyday language ideology that is widely held by Romanians in Cluj (and elsewhere in Transylvania): the strong normative expectation that all Hungarians in Romania should switch to Romanian after the customer (or other interlocutor) replies in Romanian. “What bothers me,” the student continued, a bit later in the same discussion, “is when I speak in Romanian, and then [the shop assistant] doesn’t want to serve me, or only in Hungarian: then I get upset, especially since [the shop assistant] knows both languages” (implying that the clerk could but would not speak in Romanian). Yet while this is said by Romanians to occur with some frequency in Hungarian-majority towns in the Szekler area, we have no reports of it happening in Cluj, and indeed the student explicitly noted that this does not happen in Cluj. 19 The view that Hungarians do not want to learn, or to speak, Romanian was expressed in numerous Romanian group discussions. This does not pertain primarily to interaction with strangers, but more generally to Hungarians’ apparent disdain for the Romanian language; it is part of a broader (and quite widespread) stereotypical view of Hungarians as arrogant and cliquish.

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know Romanian, and should be willing to speak it. While Hungarians agree about the importance of knowing Romanian, they are much more likely to make allowances for elderly Hungarians from predominantly Hungarian areas. And while they agree about the appropriateness of addressing strangers in Romanian, they understand this as a locally appropriate norm (given the facts of asymmetric bilingualism in Cluj), not as a statewide obligation of citizenship in the Romanian nation-state. Yet despite these differences in everyday language ideologies, language practices in interaction with strangers are not a major locus of friction in Cluj. This results from overwhelming Hungarian compliance with the norm of addressing strangers in Romanian and from widespread Romanian toleration of occasional, momentary, and nondeliberate deviations from it.20 Hungarians never complain about being “policed” by Romanians for addressing strangers in Hungarian (although, as we will see in the next section, they do complain about being policed by Romanians for speaking Hungarian with one another in public settings). This suggests both that such policing is rare, and that, when it occurs, Hungarians do not feel they have strong grounds for criticizing it. Significantly, Hungarians do not claim the right to address strangers in Hungarian (although they do claim the right to speak Hungarian among themselves in public places, when confronted with Romanian complaints about their doing so). Occasionally, older Hungarians express nostalgia for the time—up through the mid-1960s—when bilingualism was more symmetrical, and when one could legitimately address strangers in Hungarian (though one would of course switch to Romanian if the interlocutor replied in Romanian). They are particularly appreciative of the few Romanians who speak Hungarian, and they sometimes express the wish that more would do so. In one Hungarian group discussion, this came up after it had been observed that Hungarians speak Romanian as a matter of course in the presence of Romanians: Viktor: [retired engineer] It would be nice if it worked the other //way around. Tivadar: [retired postal worker] //The other way around as well. Viktor: But we won’t live to see it, and [addressing the younger members of the group] you won’t either. This is neither a political demand nor the assertion of a norm; it is a nostalgia-colored wish, one that Hungarians recognize is unrealizable, however desirable it might be. 20 Hungarian compliance with this norm—like the occasional instances of noncompliance as well—is routine and quasi-automatic, a matter of habit, not of conscious language choice.

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On rare occasions, Hungarians may suggest in interaction with strangers that Romanians—or some particular Romanian—should learn Hungarian.21 This is very likely to generate friction. In one Romanian group discussion, Monica, an unemployed seamstress in her thirties, told of hearing a woman ask for a bus ticket in Hungarian. When the ticket vendor did not understand the request, the Hungarian woman suggested the vendor could have learned Hungarian. Monica reported intervening at this point, giving the Hungarian woman a nasty look, and saying, “Damn you! What? In our country? Should I, as a Romanian, have to learn Hungarian now because you cannot speak Romanian in our country?” Even if Monica’s intervention was unusually intemperate—and perhaps more intemperate in the retelling than when it happened—it illustrates the characteristically strong Romanian rejection of any claim to or even suggestion of symmetry or reciprocity in the status of the two languages. The privileged status of Romanian is taken for granted by Romanians. This follows from the folk theory of nationalism that is widely held by those who identify with dominant or “state-bearing” nations: that a nation-state is in essence the state of and for a particular nation. The very name of the state is understood to imply a privileged position for Romanian. A middle-aged worker complained that her Hungarian co-workers had spoken Hungarian with her when she began working in the early 1980s, and had suggested that she should learn Hungarian. “This was the first thing when I started working there. [ . . . ] So I said I’ll learn Hungarian when the sign says ‘Hungary,’ not ‘Romania.’ Until then, they can’t make me.” This understanding of the nation-state is what gives plausibility to the often-repeated formula, “Speak Romanian; we’re in Romania.” Even if most Romanians would reject a radical interpretation of this formula (which would deny the legitimacy of any public use of Hungarian), very few doubt that the Romanian language should have a privileged position in Romania. This notion—so self-evident as to require no special thought or justification—is central to everyday language ideology. Private Talk in Public Places We turn now to a second interactional contingency associated with asymmetric bilingualism: the question of what language to speak in interaction 21 Such suggestions may of course also arise in intimate relationships, friendships, and family settings, where they have a different meaning. We are concerned here with the (rare) occasions on which such suggestions are made to strangers, or perhaps to colleagues at work or neighbors. The most common—and least “complainable”—form that this takes is a response to a Romanian bystander’s request to speak Romanian so that he or she could understand what is being said. To this form of policing, a characteristic Hungarian response is the following: “If you want to understand, then learn Hungarian.”

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that is considered private by the participants yet occurs in public places, and is therefore visible—and audible—to others. Like the question of what language to use in addressing strangers, this is seldom a matter of conscious choice. If one party to the interaction does not speak Hungarian, or does not speak it well, then Romanian is spoken as a matter of course; otherwise Hungarian is spoken, again as a matter of course. Most Hungarians, most of the time, speak Hungarian with other Hungarians in public places unselfconsciously, without worrying about attracting attention or provoking complaint. Occasionally, however, speaking Hungarian in public places does prompt complaint and even policing. Some Romanians occasionally report their irritation at hearing Hungarian spoken in public, typically on the bus, trolley, or tram, where they are as it were a captive audience, stuck in close proximity to the conversation: Petru: [driver, mid-twenties] No matter how much you want to deny it, it sometimes pisses you off, you know, when they talk to each other in Hungarian on the bus. Traian: [unemployed, recent high school graduate] It’s not so much that it pisses you off, it’s just irritating, it gets on your nerves. Petru: No, it’s just not right. Marius: [salesman, early twenties] It doesn’t bother me. Petru: Wait a minute, lemme explain. What I mean is that in each of us there’s a bit of Romanianism, after all, we’re Romanians, you know? Marius: Sure, nationalism. Marius initially disagrees with the irritation expressed by Petru and Traian, but aligns a moment later with Petru’s clarifying remark about “Romanianism,” as if that not only explained but legitimated the irritation that he did not himself experience. Much more common than such Romanian complaints, however, are Hungarian complaints about Romanian policing. Recall that Hungarians do not complain about Romanian policing of their interaction with strangers. The fact that they do complain about Romanian policing of intra-Hungarian interaction suggests that this is a zone of greater friction. Not chronic friction: in the great majority of instances, such interaction attracts no attention from Romanians, let alone intervention. But when policing does occur, it is felt to be patently unjust. For Hungarians, the language of private conversations—whether publicly observable or not—is nobody’s business but their own: ´´ : [young journalist] What bothers me is that, say, I’m out Erno with friends and, say, we’re on the street or in a bus, or on vacation, and then naturally I speak Hungarian and not Romanian

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because that wouldn’t make any sense at all, and then someone comes and asks me why I’m speaking Hungarian, and tells me to speak Romanian [ . . . ] Viktor: [retired engineer] Right, this is annoying, you know? This is bothersome, when it’s absolutely none of their business, when it’s two friends talking to each other and then a third person comes along, someone who has nothing to do with them, and says to them, “Speak Romanian because you’re eating Romanian bread.” As if bread had a nationality. Erno´´ frames his complaint by noting that it is only natural for Hungarians to speak Hungarian among themselves, and that it “wouldn’t make any sense at all”—it would be entirely artificial—to speak Romanian with them. Viktor elaborates on the complaint, emphasizing that the Romanians who object to Hungarian being spoken in such a setting have no “standing” in the matter, and therefore no grounds for complaint (and still less for policing).22 A similar complaint about linguistic policing was voiced in another group discussion, involving close colleagues at a Hungarian enterprise. Imre: [handyman] [ . . . ] There are lots of times when it’s really uncomfortable. My wife’s a teacher, she teaches at Brassai, a Hungarian school, Hungarian classes, and they go on field trips and the kids, the way kids are . . . they’re yelling, running around, whatever, in Hungarian, and there’s always someone telling them to speak Romanian . . . Jancsi: [locksmith] That doesn’t happen so often. Imre: . . . because they eat Romanian bread. It happens all the time, I’ve //seen this on the bus Ádám: [sound technician] //Romanian bread made from Hungarian flour!23 Imre: I noticed on the bus, some Hungarian kids got on, and like kids they were being bad, running around, they couldn’t sit 22 In some situations, “standing” is ambiguous, hinging on who is considered a legitimate participant in the interaction. The boundaries of “private” interactions are not always clear, and are sometimes contested. As a university entrance examination was about to begin, for example, a young Romanian student overheard a conversation in Hungarian between some of the students and one of the supervisors. “When they gave us the exam questions, they started speaking in Hungarian. And I was annoyed. Since I didn’t understand, he might have told them the answers as far as I knew. So this seemed [inappropriate].” The Romanian student did not know if the exchange was a legitimately private one, but she suspected that it might not be. We return in the next section to the question of who counts as a legitimate participant in an interaction. 23 Ádám’s comment, playing on Imre’s “because they eat Romanian bread,” is a reference to the fact that Romania, although itself ordinarily a grain exporter, often imports some milling wheat and wheat flour from Hungary. The previous excerpt also invokes the same line about “Romanian bread,” countering it there with the sardonic observation, “as if bread had a nationality.”

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still, and that annoys some people, and they tell the kids to speak Romanian. Lots of times I was so pissed off [laughs]. [ . . . ] It’s really uncomfortable, you have to explain to them why you’re speaking Hungarian, because they’re Romanian. Like we’re on a train, we’re in our compartment and then someone else in the compartment notices that we’re speaking Hungarian and asks why we’re speaking Hungarian. It’s none of his business. Does he want to listen to what we’re saying or what? He should learn Hungarian if he wants to understand. What can I say, it’s none of his business. If I want to talk to him, because when we’re together, I don’t know, three or four of us, and there’s a Romanian, then //I Jancsi: //You speak Romanian, out of respect, //so that— Imre: //I speak Romanian so he can be part of the conversation. Ádám: If he’s one of your friends //then— Imre: //he’s got to be able to understand. For me, //let’s say— Jancsi: //But as long as it’s no one’s business . . . When Imre’s initial account of frequent policing is challenged by Jancsi, Imre insists that it happens “all the time,” emphasizing that he has personally seen it (and is not simply repeating a standardized story he has heard from others). Imre finds particularly irritating the fact that Hungarians in such situations may have to explain—and thus to justify—why they are speaking Hungarian. Of course, he adds, if a Romanian is part of the group (and not simply overhearing a private conversation), then he would speak Romanian. Jancsi and Ádám collaborate here to formulate this point. By jumping in to pre-emptively complete Imre’s point, Jancsi shows that this is a matter of taken-for-granted, commonsense knowledge. Because such policing seems so transparently unjust, stories about its occurrence make for good conversational material. Such incidents therefore circulate widely, are told and retold (and no doubt embellished along the way), and become an important part of commonsense knowledge. In this way, stories about policing take on a certain life of their own; they acquire a weight, resonance, and symbolic centrality disproportionate to the actual frequency of policing. This is not to suggest that actual policing does not occur. Almost every Hungarian has some personal experience of being policed. One of us was in fact involved in such an incident at a bar frequented by students. Fox was speaking in Hungarian with Erika, who was tending bar. At one point, a Romanian customer who was ordering a beer complained that

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he could not understand what was being said because he did not speak Hungarian. Erika politely but firmly explained that what was being discussed did not concern him. He left without further ado, and she calmly remarked that such things unfortunately happen from time to time. But when another customer interrupted the conversation a few minutes later, though with no apparent intention of policing, Erika snapped at him, chastising him for interrupting, and asserting that it was none of his business what language she was speaking. The customer, taken aback, replied meekly, switching to Hungarian, “but I know Hungarian, too.” Erika’s frustration with the first instance of actual policing led her to interpret the second—unwarrantedly, as it turned out—as an instance of the same thing. Yet while almost all Hungarians have had some personal experience with policing, many—even nationalist Hungarians—admit when pressed that this is not a very frequent occurrence. By representing language policing as more pervasive than it is, the folk wisdom about policing can lead to anticipatory self-policing. By this we mean the tendency to avoid speaking Hungarian in certain public places, or to avoid speaking it loudly or conspicuously, out of concern that such behavior might prompt Romanian policing, or might lead to discriminatory treatment. As Imre put it, in the group discussion quoted at length above, “You have to really be careful where you go. If two of us, two Hungarians, go, I dunno, to some government office, we might have to be careful—we really shouldn’t speak Hungarian with each other because someone might hear us and then certain things might get more difficult for us since they’d know we were Hungarians.” A government office, especially a local government office during the Funar years, is obviously a special case. But some Hungarians reported being generally cautious about speaking Hungarian in public, especially during periods of political tension in the first half of the 1990s. Talk about anticipatory self-policing, however, should be distinguished from the actual practice of refraining from speaking Hungarian or taking care to speak discreetly. The former, which arises from a general sense of vulnerability to policing or discrimination that is shared by many (though by no means all) Hungarians, is more common than the latter. One incident nicely illustrates the divergence between talk about language practices and the practices themselves. Brubaker and Fox happened to encounter Elo´´d, a Hungarian law student, in the university bookstore. We had not seen him for a couple years, and we stopped to talk. Unlike most students, Elo´´d is avidly interested in politics (and holds strongly nationalist political views). Elo´´d began filling us in on what he saw as the dire situation of Hungarians in Cluj and elsewhere in Transylvania. One of his concerns was that many Hungarians did not feel com-

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fortable speaking Hungarian in public places; doing so would occasion odd looks or differential treatment in stores. Yet Elo´´d said this and much more—including talk touching on very sensitive political subjects—in Hungarian while we were standing in the most central and visible spot in the bookstore. He made no effort to speak discreetly or keep his voice down; and none of the many people within earshot, as far as we could tell, paid any special attention to the conversation. No doubt some Hungarians do in fact watch what they say and how they say it when speaking Hungarian in public. Yet such anticipatory self-policing does not pervasively shape language practices in Cluj. Hungarian is routinely spoken in public places without attracting the attention of Romanians. The great majority of the time, this is an unremarkable and unremarked practice.

Language Choice in Mixed Company The interactional contingencies of asymmetrical bilingualism are resolved in relatively uniform ways in the two settings we have considered thus far. Hungarian bilinguals in Cluj almost always speak Romanian when addressing a stranger (except in places institutionally defined as Hungarian); and they generally speak Hungarian among themselves in public places. In the mixed settings we now consider—involving at least two Hungarian bilinguals and at least one Romanian monolingual— patterns of language choice are more complex and fluid. Hungarians and Romanians agree, in principle, that one should not exclude participants in an interaction by speaking a language they do not understand. This is seen as a matter of simple politeness.24 This means that bilinguals (in this case Hungarians) should accommodate monolinguals (in this case Romanians) in mixed company.25 Yet while Hungarians never challenge this norm in principle, their actual linguistic behavior often departs from it in practice. Or at least it is so seen by Romanians. It is a common Romanian complaint that Hungarians in mixed company tend to form a bisericut¸a˘, or clique, and to 24 A large-scale survey reports that 56 percent of Transylvanian Hungarians agree that it is impolite for two Hungarians to speak Hungarian when there are Romanians present, regardless of the topic; this is nearly as many as the 71 percent of Romanians who agree with the same statement (Research Center for Interethnic Relations, “Ethnobarometer,” 307). 25 This norm of accommodation is found in many other settings of asymmetric bilingualism. For the Catalan case, see Woolard, Double Talk, 69ff. In Catalonia, however, the mutual intelligibility of Catalan and Castilian make possible bilingual conversation, in which each participant speaks her preferred language. A similar situation prevails in Ukraine, where RussiaUkrainian bilingual conversations are common (see Arel, “A Lurking Cascade”; Bilaniuk, “Diglossia in Flux”).

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speak Hungarian among themselves.26 Consider the following excerpt from a group discussion involving workers in their forties: Moderator: Some people say that if there is one Romanian and two Hungarians and they’re friends or something, talking, the Hungarians //speak Hungarian— Ion: //Sure. Veta: //Exactly. That’s true. Moderator: Has it happened to you? Does it bother you? Veta: //Yes, of course. Ion: //It bothers you, of course it bothers you. I can tell you it happens at work. Mariana: It’s uncivilized. Nelu: But there are some who answer in Romanian even though the other asks something in Hungarian. Veta: The polite ones. Nelu: The polite ones, because they’re embarrassed to do it in front of me. Anica: Right, and they know you don’t speak Hungarian and then you think they’re talking about you or . . . Nelu: There are decent people but no, in 90 percent of the cases it’s true. Veta: As I said before, my neighbor is very good to me and we always help each other out. We were gardening together and this other neighbor, a Hungarian woman, came up. She [the first neighbor] stopped speaking Romanian and I got mad and left, let them work together or whatever. I felt bad, to be honest. I don’t understand Hungarian so what was I supposed to do? Watch them talk or what? That Hungarians tend to speak Hungarian among themselves, thereby excluding Romanians, is part of the taken-for-granted stock of commonsense knowledge of most Romanian Clujeni. The taken-for-grantedness of this knowledge is indicated here by the fact that two participants jump in with confirming comments before the moderator has even finished her initial sentence.27 Nelu notes that some Hungarians always speak Romanian if Romanians are present, even if this means responding in Romanian to a remark addressed in Hungarian. But while this is appreciated, it is seen as an exception. What makes the bisericut¸a˘ behavior Bisericut¸a˘, the diminutive of biserica˘, church, is literally a small church or chapel. We generally avoided posing direct questions in our group discussions. Toward the end of the discussions, however, we sometimes broached certain issues directly (see appendix B, “A Note on Data”). Although direct questions often elicit standardized, even clichéd answers, these can serve (as in the instance in the text) as useful indicators of taken-for-granted, commonsense views. 26 27

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more objectionable, for most Romanians, is that, as Anica observes, Hungarians know that most Romanians do not understand Hungarian. The exclusion is therefore seen not as accidental, but as deliberate; and it is only natural, Anica suggests, for Romanians to think Hungarians might be talking about them behind their back by doing so in front of their face, as it were.28 Do behavior and norm diverge as sharply as the bisericut¸a˘ complaint suggests? This is not a question to which an objective answer can be given. For while the norm is not contested, its application to concrete situations is anything but straightforward. It is one thing to agree that it is rude to exclude participants in an interaction by speaking a language that they do not understand. But who counts as a participant? And what are the boundaries of an interaction? In the garden incident reported in the excerpt above, this seems to have been clear enough. But it is often more ambiguous.29 The ambiguity results (in part) from some general features of complex and internally heterogeneous interactional undertakings. Think of a group of friends going out to a bar, or a wedding party, or a set of colleagues interacting at work. Activities like these do not ordinarily involve a single sustained interactional focus. Instead, they are made up of a series of smaller interactions that have their own boundaries and their own sets of participants. The component interactions can be as fleeting as an exchange of a word or two, but they can also be relatively sustained.30 The contingencies of asymmetrical bilingualism play out in complex and varied ways in settings such as these. For bilinguals, they provide ample opportunity for code-switching—from Romanian to Hungarian when the interactional focus shifts to a local intra-Hungarian involvement, and back to Romanian when the interactional focus widens again.31 Such code-switching is regulated in a quasi-automatic manner; it seldom involves conscious choice, or even conscious awareness, let alone an intention to exclude. Yet what seems entirely natural and taken-for-granted— to the point of invisibility—to bilinguals can be conspicuously visible, and can sometimes (though by no means always) seem exclusionary, to 28 On the exclusionary effects of switching to a language not understood by all participants, see Myers-Scotton, “Codeswitching as Indexical of Social Negotiations.” 29 On divergent understandings of who counts as a participant in a mixed Saxon and Romanian village in Transylvania, see McClure and McClure, “Macro- and Micro-Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Codeswitching,” 33–34. 30 See Goffman, Encounters, 18, on “multifocused gatherings,” such as parties, in which “persons immediately present to one another can be parceled out into different encounters.” 31 From the large literature on code-switching, see for example Heller, ed., Codeswitching; Gumperz, Discourse Strategies, chapter 4; Gal, “Codeswitching and Consciousness”; Woolard, Double Talk, 64ff.

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monolinguals. It can thereby contribute to the impression that Hungarians, in mixed settings, seize every opportunity to speak Hungarian among themselves. To the extent that Hungarians are aware of using Hungarian in mixed settings, they generally account for this by distinguishing matters relevant only to the immediate intra-Hungarian interaction from those relevant to the wider undertaking. Sometimes this is done using an idiom of privacy, as in the following excerpt from a group discussion, in which Tivadar, the retired postal worker, describes language practices at work: If I was speaking with a colleague—speaking Hungarian with a Hungarian colleague—and a Romanian colleague came up to us, and we were talking about something like, let’s say, soccer, then I would switch to Romanian so that he would understand, too. But if I was talking with my colleague about, let’s say, some family matter, then I would continue to speak Hungarian because what my goddaughter is doing is none of his [the Romanian colleague’s] business, you know? The taken-for-granted assumption displayed here that Tivadar’s family affairs are the business of his Hungarian but not of his Romanian colleague nicely illustrates his association of Hungarian with relatively private and intimate matters.32 Of more immediate interest here, however, is the inherent interactional asymmetry of such “private” side-involvements.33 However self-evidently “private,” and irrelevant to the wider interaction, a particular intra-Hungarian side-involvement might be to the participants, its private character is by definition not available to a co-present Romanian monolingual, who may therefore feel excluded by it. Generally, however, speaking Hungarian in mixed settings is less a practice Hungarians defend than one of which they are unaware: Miklós: [skilled worker] We speak Romanian and Hungarian perfectly. So if someone comes in, a Romanian who doesn’t speak Hungarian [ . . . ] then we speak Romanian so he can understand, too. Viktor: [retired engineer] And without even being bothered by this, or without any “damn it [ . . . ] now we have to speak Romanian.” No, it’s just elementary good manners. 32 On the similar understanding of Welsh, see Trosset, Welshness Performed, 130–31. Welshspeakers often invoke privacy to account for the use of Welsh in the presence of English monolinguals. On the symbolic association of minority languages with in-group relations, perceived as personal and informal, see Gumperz’s distinction between “we” and “they” codes, Discourse Strategies, chapter 4. On ethnicity’s “kinship with kinship” more generally, see for example Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 57–64. 33 On “side-involvements” generally, see Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 43; we use the term in a somewhat looser sense here.

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Yet despite Miklós’s claim, most Hungarians are not equally proficient in Romanian. As we observed above, almost all bilingualism involves differential command of the two languages. And most Cluj Hungarians— even those who are fluent in Romanian—feel more comfortable speaking Hungarian. Some Hungarians report getting anxious whenever they have to take care of some nonroutine bureaucratic, legal, or medical matter in Romanian. A sales clerk in her mid-twenties who speaks Romanian at work observed in a group discussion that “there isn’t anything you understand as well as you do in your own native language. So if I go to take care of some official business, I get all flustered, because I don’t understand the Romanian expressions they’re using. I know Romanian, but I don’t know the technical terms they use, and I don’t have anyone I can ask.” Comfort is not simply a matter of grammatical mastery (though in more formal contexts, uncertainty about grammar, syntax, or diction can occasion acute discomfort). It is about style, rhythm, wit, charm, playfulness, nuance, and spontaneity; it is about relating (and relating to) stories, telling (and understanding) jokes, making (and appreciating) allusions. Even in impersonal settings involving routine transactions, where such interactional graces are less important, speaking Romanian may pose difficulties, requiring one to switch abruptly from thinking in Hungarian to speaking in Romanian. Here is an account from a man in his mid-thirties who works in a largely Hungarian-speaking milieu: “When I go to a store, I’m thinking to myself in Hungarian what I need to get, what I need to buy, you know, a soda, a . . . and then all of a sudden, thinking about all this stuff, I get to the checkout, and they start talking to me in Romanian, and then right away I’ve got to start thinking in Romanian, and I stutter a bit, and then I talk to them in Romanian with no problem, but [not] until I switch from one to the other.” The deeply embodied experience of being at home in one’s native language, and of being uncomfortable, in some settings, speaking another language can lead Hungarians to gravitate unselfconsciously, and often unconsciously, to Hungarian, even in situations in which they think they should—and think they do—speak Romanian. Brubaker and Feischmidt observed (and participated in) an example of this during a late evening dinner at the apartment of Bianca, a Romanian student. Participants included, besides Bianca (who spoke no Hungarian), her Hungarian boyfriend, Csaba, and his old friend Zsigmond (a Hungarian from the Szekler region), as well as the two of us: three bilingual Hungarians, one monolingual Romanian, and Brubaker. Even though Bianca spoke no Hungarian, the conversation slipped into Hungarian on a number of occasions. Once, not finding the right words to express himself as forcefully as he wanted in Romanian, Csaba switched

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to Hungarian in the middle of a sentence. On other occasions, too, when the conversation grew more animated, and more personal, it veered into Hungarian; when discussing more dispassionate matters, it was easier to stick with Romanian. This illustrates the importance of comfort in generating code-switching. There was no intent to exclude; the intent was to include. When the conversation switched into Hungarian, someone would eventually become aware of this and switch back to Romanian. But effort and attention were required, while with no effort at all, and without anyone even noticing, the conversation recurrently slipped into Hungarian.34 The conscious effort and even self-policing required to keep the conversation in Romanian in mixed company came out clearly in a more formal setting, involving the founding meetings of a local charitable organization.35 The dozen or so members of the group, all Hungarians, were recruited primarily through the church and friendship networks of the founder. However, the two lawyers recruited to help write the bylaws and register the association, and take care of other official business, were Romanian (and neither spoke Hungarian). During the two organizational meetings we observed, a concerted effort was made to speak Romanian.36 This was easier than at a party, because the meeting generally had a single focus of attention, with minimal conversational byplay. Still, some Hungarian participants occasionally started speaking Hungarian. When this happened, the leader of the meeting would always respond in Romanian, assuring that the conversation would proceed further in Romanian. Sometimes even a conscious wish to speak Romanian—arising from a sense of the appropriateness of doing so in a particular situation—may be insufficient to prevent one from speaking Hungarian. A nice example of this comes from the experience of a young Hungarian woman, in the early years of the Funar era. She had some business to take care of at a municipal office, where, as a matter of course, she spoke Romanian. It turned out that she needed some further information, and had to call her father to obtain it. This presented the woman with a dilemma. She did 34 Brubaker, whose competence in Romanian was very limited at this early point in our research, participated minimally in the conversation. Without any prior intention of doing so, he became interested in the code-switching and paid close attention to it, reconstructing it immediately afterwards through detailed notes, and through conversation with Feischmidt. Significantly, Feischmidt had not been fully aware of the extent of the code-switching, or even of the occasions on which she herself had initiated a shift to Hungarian. This is further evidence of the largely unconscious character of code-switching, and of the manner in which it is regulated by sens pratique and a sense of comfort. 35 For more on this association, see chapter 9, pp. 281–82. 36 One meeting was observed by Brubaker, the other by Grancea.

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not want to speak to her father in Hungarian in this official setting, and in the immediate presence of—indeed using the telephone of—the official with whom she had been speaking in Romanian all along. The issue was not that she did not want to reveal her Hungarian identity; the official could probably tell from her accent, or from her name, that she was Hungarian. The issue was rather that speaking Hungarian in an official setting would have been strongly marked, especially in the context of the strongly nationalist municipal administration that had recently come to power; and the woman wanted to conduct her business as an unmarked Clujeanca˘, not as a Hungarian. On the other hand, she simply could not bring herself to speak to her father in Romanian; it felt too unnatural. In the end, she did speak Hungarian, but only because she found it almost physically impossible to do otherwise. Of the various mixed settings we have considered, workplaces are by far the most productive of Romanian bisericut¸a˘ complaints, of instances of language policing, and of Hungarian countercomplaints about policing. Workplaces of course vary a great deal on a number of dimensions, and it is difficult to generalize about them. Yet one can identify certain characteristic ways in which the contingencies of asymmetrical bilingualism can generate workplace frictions. Workplaces are mixed settings of a special sort. Although they are sites of sociable interaction, they are not (unlike weddings, parties, family gatherings, dinners with friends, excursions, gatherings in bars and cafes, and other social gatherings) dedicated to such interaction. As a result, bilingual Hungarians often find it easy to distinguish between private conversation and more impersonal work-related conversation. From this perspective, carrying on a private conversation in Hungarian at a workplace (especially during a break) is like having a private conversation in any other publicly observable space. A loquacious, sixtyish Hungarian woman recalled an incident just before she retired, when she was discussing her pending retirement with her foreman, who happened to be Hungarian: This Romanian colleague comes over and says: “If you please,” she says, “in my presence speak Romanian.” And I say “Really? Was I talking to you?,” I say. “When I talk to you I’ll speak Romanian. The foreman is Hungarian, I’m Hungarian, I talk to him in Hungarian. If you want to know what we’re talking about, learn Hungarian yourself.” I was very hurt that the foreman sided with her and not with me—he switched to Romanian right away. I said, “These are private matters that I’m discussing with the foreman. And it’s not your concern. When I have something to say to you, I’ll say it in Romanian.”

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As in the workplace example quoted earlier (“what my god-daughter is doing is none of his business”), the complaint about policing turns here on a claim to privacy; the Romanian colleague is treated as having no legitimate standing, and no right to interfere. The twist here is that the complaint also targets the Hungarian foreman for switching to Romanian rather than defending the use of Hungarian. Yet unlike private conversations that just happen to occur in publicly observable settings, putatively private workplace interaction is potentially observable not by strangers, but by colleagues. And monolingual colleagues can feel deliberately excluded by Hungarian conversations in a way that is unlikely to occur if a stranger hears Hungarian spoken on a bus or in a bar. Not being able to verify the private quality of the conversation, they may suspect that they are being deliberately excluded, or even deliberately talked about. As a result, Romanians who would not even think of complaining or intervening upon hearing Hungarian in public settings like a bar or a bus might be more inclined to do so upon hearing Hungarian spoken at work. We have no accounts in which Romanians admit to policing private Hungarian conversations in public settings, but we do have accounts in which they admit to policing such conversations at work. Two fortyish Romanian workers described language practices in their factory as follows: Nicoleta: Between Romanians and Hungarians, in our section for instance, we speak Romanian. Sure, the Hungarians can hardly wait to be alone before they retreat into a corner and “hodoro, hodoro” [Hungarian-sounding gibberish], as we call it, they speak Hungarian. But in general we speak Romanian, we don’t— we don’t let [them] push us around. Doru: Of course not, we call them on it. We ask them, “Are you cursing us again? [that is, talking about us behind our backs]. Because we don’t understand what you’re saying, so it’s not nice.” But in general . . . Nicoleta: //Nicely [that is, we ask them nicely] Doru: //on the local level, ordinary people get along well. In another Romanian group discussion, an electrician in his mid-forties described how he would intervene: “For instance, if two of my coworkers speak Hungarian, I ask them to ‘change the channel.’ I tell them directly, I’m more bold, there are others who don’t say anything. ‘Switch to the Romanian channel.’ There are all these expressions we use in the factory.” These excerpts suggest the existence of informal language regimes in workplaces, enforced through informal policing.

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Language Mixing in Intraethnic Settings Almost all Cluj Hungarians are bilingual; but the great majority are more comfortable speaking Hungarian than Romanian. We have shown how this differential comfort generates a kind of gravitational pull toward Hungarian, making it easy for Hungarians to slip into Hungarian in mixed settings, and requiring extra effort and attention to speak Romanian. This, in turn, generates the characteristic Romanian complaint about the Hungarian tendency to form a bisericut¸a˘. Yet Hungarians’ differential command of the two languages is not uniform across domains. For many Hungarians, there are domains—often those associated with work or bureaucratic matters—in which they are more familiar with Romanian than with Hungarian terminology.37 And almost all Hungarians occasionally use some Romanian words, even in domains in which they ordinarily speak Hungarian. They may not know the Hungarian word, or the Romanian word or expression may simply come more readily to mind. Such mixing is very common, and is generally unremarked by speakers or listeners. To an even greater extent than code-switching, it is generally done unselfconsciously.38 When the practice is remarked on, it is sometimes simply noticed as a curiosity, with no evaluative judgment attached, as in this example from the group discussion quoted above: Miklós: I don’t know if you noticed, but in our vocabulary there are some— I mean, when we speak we just mix in Romanian words. Tivadar: Yes, automatically. Miklós: Automatically, because it comes to us easily, doesn’t it? I’d rather say suc [“juice” in Romanian] than üdito ´´ [“juice” in Hungarian] because it’s shorter or something, I don’t even know why. Miklós: We got used to it. 37 In some settings, bilinguals’ language use may be sharply separated by domain. When one language is used primarily or exclusively for “low” functions (that is, everyday informal purposes in family, neighborhood, and friendship circles), while another language is used primarily or exclusively for “higher” activities (those associated with higher education, science, professional life, et cetera), sociolinguists speak of “diglossia” (Ferguson, “Diglossia”). The language practices of some Cluj Hungarians—generally those with minimal or no education in Hungarian schools—are characterized by elements of diglossia. 38 Sometimes it takes a trip to Hungary to make people aware of the extent of the borrowing. Imre, the handyman quoted above, was unaware of the extent to which he used Romanian words until he worked with a construction crew in Hungary, and realized he knew only the Romanian terms for tools. He had attended Hungarian-language elementary and high schools, but technical subjects had been taught in Romanian.

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On other occasions, however, the practice is treated as problematic, and as requiring an account, excuse, or apology. This may involve no more than simply saying that one does not know the Hungarian word or phrase. The following example is slightly more elaborate, with a display of ironic self-awareness added to the acknowledgment of not knowing the Hungarian expression. Having characterized his mother’s occupation in Hungarian as a “chief accountant,” a young Hungarian entrepreneur went on, laughing, “better said, in good old Hungarian language, expert contabil [Romanian for “expert accountant”]. Well, I don’t know the exact Hungarian phrase for it.” Occasionally, the use of Romanian words prompts comment from others. Sometimes this is a form of collaborative “repair,” as when the second speaker provides the Hungarian word or expression after the first speaker acknowledges not knowing it, or searches for it, or asks for help in identifying it.39 At other times, it amounts to an intraethnic form of language policing. Most often, such policing is itself rather inconspicuous, being embedded in the ongoing flow of conversation through the proffering of the Hungarian equivalent after a Romanian word or expression has been used.40 In some contexts, however, the policing is more explicit and elaborate, as illustrated by the following exchange between Ági and her grandparents Karcsi and Piroska, in the context of a discussion of Ági’s preparation for university entrance examinations: Karcsi: She had a tutor for Romanian //gramatika. [Romanian word for “grammar,” in Hungarian pronunciation] Ági: //But my generation, we were very well prepared. When we //finished twelfth grade there were good students. Piroska: //Romanian nyelvtan [Hungarian word for “grammar,” correcting Karcsi’s mixing] Ági: The bacalaureat [Romanian word] grades were high but they came from all over the place and that was the problem, you know? From all the backward little towns, they came with the highest grade so that was it. And the second time they weren’t so well prepared anymore. Piroska: My dear, the érettségi grades [Hungarian word for “baccalaureate,” correcting Ági’s mixing]. Ági: the érettségi, //then. Karcsi: //Okay, stop saying bacalaureat, //that’s in Romanian. Ági: //And uh 39 On the notion of “repair” in conversation analysis, see Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks, “The Preference for Self-Correction.” 40 Sometimes this is done by the speaker herself, in an embedded form of self-policing.

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Piroska: But you say it like that, too. Ági: //And uh Karcsi: //No, I don’t, //I say érettségi. Piroska: //You said it just now. Karcsi: What? Piroska: Bacalaureat. Karcsi: I didn’t, I said érettségi, I never say that, how could I say it in Romanian? Ági: Okay. Karcsi: It’s just that she uses Romanian words. In the first line of this excerpt, Karcsi unselfconsciously uses the Romanian word for “grammar”; Piroska corrects him, after an intervening turn by Ági, by supplying the Hungarian equivalent. Immediately thereafter, Ági uses the Romanian word for the baccalaureate examination; with a bit of delay, Piroska corrects her in the same way. At this point, Karcsi intervenes in a more explicit and ideological manner:41 “Stop saying bacalaureat, that’s in Romanian.” Piroska then claims that Karcsi himself had just used that very same Romanian word earlier in the conversation, which Karcsi forcefully denies (“I never say that, how could I say it in Romanian?”). Policing how language is spoken is of course not limited to ethnolinguistic minorities; it is part of all language socialization. Families and schools police the language of children in an effort to inculcate the “proper” use of language—and the use of “proper” language. In both families and schools, such linguistic socialization is central to the shaping and reshaping of social identities. Schools generally seek to impose the use of standard idioms, while linguistic policing in families is often bound up with class and status: “This is how we speak,” “We are not the kind of people who speak like that” (for example, we don’t use “vulgar” words).42 For members of an ethnolinguistic minority, the inculcation of the proper use of language in families and minority-language schools can also involve “purist” efforts to protect the language against “corruption” from the dominant language.43 Class, status, and ethnicity are often intertwined in such efforts. A Hungarian woman recalled how, as elementary 41 On the distinction between two modes of correction, see Jefferson, “On Exposed and Embedded Correction in Conversation.” 42 See for example Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language”; for a review of work on language and inequality, see Gal, “Language and Political Economy,” 350ff. 43 Language purism is not, of course, restricted to linguistic minorities; it is found in many settings in which there is concern about the excessive influence of foreign languages. For overviews, see Thomas, Linguistic Purism; Woolard and Schieffelin, “Language Ideology,” 64–65. On purism in post-Soviet Ukraine, see Bilaniuk, “Speaking of Surzhyk,” and Arel, “A

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school children, she and her friends used to correct classmates who used Romanian words in their everyday speech. References to speaking “pure” or “impure” Hungarian invoked class differences and, at the same time, made salient distinctions between “good” and “Romanianized” Hungarians. Yet as the conversation between Karcsi, Ági, and Piroska showed, intraethnic language policing is not confined to the well-educated.

Conclusion In a context of asymmetrical bilingualism, we have seen, there are certain patterned ways in which language practices serve as a vehicle for everyday ethnicity. On the one hand, language practices—especially the use of one language rather than another—can generate attention, friction, or complaint. This is not an everyday experience for most Clujeni; but neither is it an extremely rare occurrence. Most Romanian Clujeni have personal experience of Hungarians speaking Hungarian in mixed company, while most Hungarian Clujeni have personally experienced policing by Romanians. On the other hand, standardized representations of language practices—at once descriptive and prescriptive—can make the everyday, lived reality of ethnicity relevant independently of such moments of friction. These include things that Romanians “know” about Hungarians (for example, that they seize every opportunity to speak Hungarian among themselves, and in so doing heedlessly exclude Romanian monolinguals), and things that Hungarians “know” about Romanians (for example, that they are prone to intervene illegitimately in private intraHungarian conversations). These standardized formulations are not wholly removed from personal experience. They may be based in part on, or reinforced by, personal experience of occasions on which language choice was a focus of attention, site of friction, or object of complaint. Yet as part of the stock of commonsense knowledge, such things that “everyone knows” are nourished as much by second-hand stories as by personal experience. Such commonsense knowledge is another form through which everyday ethnicity works. Such commonsense knowledge, in turn, can shape the experience of ethnicity.44 Exchanged among friends and family members, for example, Lurking Cascade.” While the relative status of Ukrainian and Russian continues to be contested in parts of Ukraine (see Laitin, Identity in Formation, 144–51), the mixed Russian-Ukrainian forms of speech known as surzhyk are widely denigrated as low-status forms. 44 That commonsense knowledge can provide templates for the interpretation of ambiguous experience, and can thereby be in some measure self-confirming and resistant to counterevidence, is a familiar theme in the social psychology literature.

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stories about language policing serve not only to report events but to enact ethnic solidarity; they not only describe but constitute sociolinguistic reality. As a powerful interpretive template, commonsense knowledge about policing can help make sense of ambiguous sociolinguistic experience—both as it occurs and after the fact—and can thereby help produce the events that it purports to describe. The Hungarian bartender’s (mistaken) assumption that she was being policed, described above, is an example of this productive quality of commonsense knowledge, reinforced in this case by an immediately prior policing incident.45 Among Romanians, the common-sense knowledge that Hungarians tend to form a bisericut¸a˘ can be similarly productive of the experience it describes. “Knowing” that Hungarians are cliquish and prefer to speak Hungarian with one another, and feeling linguistically and socially excluded by this practice, Romanians may refrain from approaching a Hungarian-speaking group—which, were they to do so, would ordinarily prompt a shift to Romanian—or may withdraw when Hungarian is spoken in mixed settings. As a law student reported, “If I’m with them [Hungarians] and they start speaking Hungarian, I don’t know a word in Hungarian, I feel uncomfortable, I don’t understand anything, so I leave, I don’t stick around. That’s why I haven’t made any friends, because they speak Hungarian and I don’t understand anything.” Another student explained that if Hungarians wanted to include him, they would speak in Romanian; by speaking Hungarian, they signaled to him that he was not to be included. By imputing an exclusionary intent to what is ordinarily an unselfconscious practice, Romanians can contribute to producing the phenomenon about which they complain. This is related to a more general point. We argued in the preceding chapter that ethnicity is often a matter of seeing as. This is nicely illustrated by Imre’s description of noisy Hungarian school groups on field trips.46 Like all kids on such trips, Hungarian kids are often loud and somewhat unruly. But while Romanian kids behaving in the same way would be perceived (and treated) as loud or unruly kids, and told to quiet down, Hungarian kids—on Imre’s account—are seen (and treated) as Hungarian kids, and told to speak Romanian. We have analyzed three ways in which language can become a vehicle for ethnicity. First, as we discussed in the preceding chapter, what language is spoken or how it is spoken can be a cue to ethnonational category membership. Second, in the settings discussed in this chapter, speaking Hungarian generates occasional moments of ethnolinguistic friction. Third, standardized commonsense understandings of how “the 45 46

See pp. 249–50, above. See pp. 248–49, above.

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Romanians” and “the Hungarians” do and should behave in a context of asymmetric bilingualism both build on such occasional experiences of friction and, as we have just suggested, contribute to producing them. Our discussion in this chapter has focused primarily on moments of ethnicized friction, when the language that is spoken, or the manner in which it is spoken, becomes a focus of attention, an object of complaint, or a site of contestation. But as we observed in passing above, language can be a vehicle for ethnicity without being expressly problematized. Language is a deeply embodied competence, and the experience of speaking “one’s own” language is often associated with a feeling of phenomenological comfort, a sense of being at home in the social world. This is particularly true for those who, like most Cluj Hungarians, have the contrastive experience of speaking on a daily basis a language that is not their own, in which they cannot express themselves with the same freedom, ease, wit, or nuance, and cannot therefore negotiate complex interactions with full confidence and fluency. This provides most Hungarians with an important embodied experiential substratum for ethnicity that most Romanians lack.

Chapter 9




INSTITUTIONS

When we introduced Zsolt and Kati in chapter 5, we observed that they lived in a Romanian city, but in a Hungarian world. Having grown up in Hungarian milieux, attended Hungarian schools, and worked in Hungarian enterprises, they socialize with Hungarian friends, read Hungarian newspapers, even shop at a local Hungarian-owned store. They are more encapsulated than most Hungarians in Cluj, especially those of their generation. But for almost all Hungarians, the existence of this world is a fact of central importance for the social organization and personal experience of ethnicity. We have already discussed the asymmetries—political, demographic, sociolinguistic, cognitive, and interactional—that structure the experience of ethnicity in Cluj. Here we address a further asymmetry, this one organizational and institutional. We focus on the existence of a separate Hungarian world, nested within and more or less insulated from the wider Romanian world. The production and reproduction of a separate Hungarian world— what Zoltán Kántor has called an “ethno-civil society”—can be analyzed both as a political project and as an interlocking set of social processes.1 We analyzed the former—in particular the ethnopolitical struggles over the Hungarian school system—in Part One; we focus here on the latter. What do we mean by a Hungarian “world”? What sustains this world—and what tends to erode it? How is this world organized, and how does it shape the experience of ethnicity in Cluj? In what ways, and to what degree, is it a world apart? How is it related to the wider “Romanian” world? Through what processes is it reproduced—and to what extent is it reproduced—over time? These are the questions we address in this chapter. Given the greater salience of ethnicity for Hungarians, some of our chapters have given greater weight to their experience. At the same time, we have attended to the experience of Romanians—and to the experience of Clujeni in general: as we have emphasized, much of everyday life is not ethnically differentiated or experienced in ethnic terms. This chapter is distinctive in taking the Hungarian world as its object of 1 On the construction of an ethno-civil society as a political project of the DAHR, see Kántor, “Nationalizing Minorities,” 256–58.

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analysis, and focusing on the organization and experience of ethnicity for Hungarians. Our primary concern here is with institutions. For the Hungarian world is an institutionally grounded world, sustained not only by personal preferences, but by public policies; not only through informal networks but through formal institutions, organizations, and associations; not only in the private sphere of family and friendship but in the public sphere of schools, churches, workplaces, associations, and media. The Hungarian world is built on durable institutional orders, not only on ephemeral encounters. Yet we are not concerned with institutions alone. We seek to analyze the connections between institutional orders, social relations, and the texture of social experience. We seek to show how formal institutions and organizations shape informal social relations, and how networks of friends and acquaintances established in public institutional spaces carry over into other domains. We seek to show how individual choices—and the persons making those choices—both shape and are shaped by institutional orders: how the world of Hungarian schools, churches, enterprises, newspapers, organizations, associations, and clubs is produced and reproduced by Hungarians, and how that world produces and— within limits—reproduces Hungarians and “Hungarianness.” We seek to explore, finally, how the existence of an institutionalized Hungarian world shapes the experience of ethnicity. Within the Hungarian world, we will show, “Hungarian” ceases to be the marked category that it is in the wider world, and becomes instead the unmarked, “default” category. As a result, there is an important sense in which ethnicity is experientially less salient within than it is outside the Hungarian world. That world produces and reproduces Hungarians; yet at the same time, it makes Hungarianness less salient and visible. Of course, there are moments of heightened experience of ethnicity within the Hungarian world; we discuss some of these below. And ethnicity often becomes visible and salient at the boundaries of the Hungarian world—at the interface between it and the wider world. Yet the power of the Hungarian world lies precisely in its capacity to “unmark” ethnicity, to make Hungarianness experientially invisible. Two images suggest themselves as ways of characterizing the Hungarian world: that of a parallel world, and that of an enclave, nested within the wider world. Each captures something important about the institutional organization of ethnicity in Cluj, but neither is fully adequate by itself. The notion of parallel Hungarian and Romanian worlds captures the fact that in some domains there are parallel institutional “tracks” or

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dualistic structures.2 Most importantly, there is a separate state-run Hungarian school system alongside the Romanian school system; it is possible to spend one’s entire educational career, at all levels, in Hungarian institutions or tracks. There are Hungarian churches and newspapers and a Hungarian theater, opera, and puppet theater alongside Romanian ones. Yet the image of parallel tracks is problematic on closer inspection. It suggests symmetry, yet we have emphasized the asymmetry in the organization and experience of ethnicity in Cluj. It implies that the “Hungarian” and “Romanian” worlds are “Hungarian” and “Romanian,” respectively, in the same way. But this is not the case. As we suggested above, the Hungarian world is understood (by those inside and outside it) as a special world, a marked world, a world apart, in relation to the unmarked Romanian world. The Hungarian world is marked as Hungarian; but the Romanian world is not marked as Romanian in the same way. It is understood simply as the unmarked, taken-for-granted world. We have just observed, to be sure, that the Hungarian world, too, is experienced by its inhabitants, much of the time, as an unmarked, taken-for-granted world; 2 The idea of parallel social worlds was most fully articulated in the theory of plural societies advanced by Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304ff., and developed by M. G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies; this was an attempt to make sense of deeply divided colonial societies, characterized by a plurality of discrete groups with sharply differing cultures, integrated only in the marketplace and in the polity (and in the latter only by a coercive colonial state standing above society). Van den Berghe’s Race and Racism and Schermerhorn’s Comparative Ethnic Relations brought greater precision and wider comparative scope to the discussion. They sharply distinguished cultural and structural pluralism, the latter, in van den Berghe’s cogent formulation, based on “duplicative” institutional segmentation, involving compartmentalization into “analogous, parallel, noncomplementary but distinguishable sets of institutions” (34). In the extreme case of structural pluralism, the colonial state is the only integrative institution; all other spheres of life—kinship, religion, education, recreation, even much of economic life—are organized in parallel segments. This ensures that most social interaction is withingroup, interethnic interaction being fleeting, occasional, or restricted to the market (Schermerhorn, Comparative Ethnic Relations, 124–25; cf. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304). What Schermerhorn called the “degree of enclosure”—as indicated by such factors as “endogamy, ecological concentration, institutional duplication, associational clustering, and rigidity and clarity of group definition” (125, 127)—is variable; it is minimal for most ethnic groups in the United States, but was high in South Africa under apartheid (though not maximal, given common participation in the industrial economy). For a summary of recent criticisms of this line of work, see Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 27–28. An alternative model of parallel worlds or “pillars” (popularized in English by Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation) was developed to account for the moderate degree of social enclosure in the Dutch experience (and has been applied to Belgium and to Catholic and communist subculture in Italy as well). For most of the twentieth century, the “pillars” of Dutch society— Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and (on some accounts) liberals—had their own “schools, universities, political parties, hospitals, sports clubs . . . newspapers and periodicals” (Nieuwenhuis, “Media Policy in the Netherlands,” 197). Institutional parallelism and mutual insulation, however, have broken down in recent decades as a result of secularization, individualization, and the weakening of political parties based on ideology or world views; this has led commentators to speak of “depillarization.”

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this is what warrants our characterizing it as a “world.” Yet it is not a “gapless,” comprehensive world. Even those most fully encapsulated within the Hungarian world cannot avoid the daily reminders— sociolinguistic and, under Funar, ethnopolitical—that it is not a world of the same order as the wider, environing world. The second image is that of an enclave nested or embedded in a wider world.3 This, too, captures something important about the structure, and the experience, of the Hungarian world. It allows for the asymmetry in the way the worlds are experienced. It captures the sense—and the reality—of being part of a “special,” “different,” smaller and more intimate society, surrounded by a wider society. And unlike the parallelworlds imagery (which suggests that the worlds, like parallel lines, never meet), the enclave imagery evokes the notion of an interface between the worlds that is the site for various kinds of “boundary work.”4 Yet the enclave metaphor itself requires qualification in three respects. First, it implies—or might be taken to imply—spatial contiguity. The Szekler region, where the large majority of the population is Hungarian, does constitute such a territorial enclave. Yet there are no Hungarian spatial enclaves in Cluj, no Hungarian neighborhoods, no territorial base for ethnicity. There are institutional “spaces,” and these do of course occupy physical places, which serve in a sense as small physical enclaves; but ethnicity is not territorialized the way it is in cities such as Belfast or Jerusalem or even (in a very different way) in New York or Los Angeles.5 The image of an archipelago—suggesting a loose array of 3 Models of nested social worlds have been developed chiefly in the context of the study of immigration. Breton’s “Institutional Completeness of Ethnic Communities” introduced the notion of “institutional completeness” to capture the extent to which immigrants could satisfy the full range of their needs, including “education, work, food and clothing, medical care, or social assistance,” within the institutional confines of the immigrant ethnic community itself, and the extent to which they looked to mainstream social institutions outside the ethnic community for these services. The institutions Breton was interested in belonged to the spheres of education, religion, charity and social work, politics, recreation, health, and media. Breton mentioned commercial and professional associations as well, but these had a secondary importance for him. More recently, a literature on immigrant ethnic enclaves has developed, taking off from Breton’s notion of institutional completeness but placing much greater emphasis on economic institutions. Other aspects of institutional completeness are seen in this literature as based on a flourishing ethnic economy. For a critical overview of this debate, see Waldinger, “The Ethnic Enclave Debate Revisited”; for a review of more recent work on the ethnic economy, see Light, “The Ethnic Economy.” 4 Although Barth’s influential introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries popularized the notion of ethnic boundaries, the notion of “boundary work” has been used chiefly in the sociology of science (see Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from NonScience”). For a survey of sociological work on boundaries, see Lamont and Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries”; for a systematic review of strategies of ethnic boundary-making, and hypotheses explaining variations in boundary formation, see Wimmer, “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries.” 5 See for example Friedland and Hecht, To Rule Jerusalem; Bollens, On Narrow Ground; and Clark, “Residential Patterns.”

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physically separate institutional “islands”—might be more appropriate than that of an enclave (though this image, too, is limited by its spatial connotations). Second, the nesting metaphor implies that the enclave is wholly contained within the wider Romanian world. In a physical sense, this is true. But when one thinks not of physical but of social “space,” not of a territorial but of an institutional and social-relational enclave, the limits of the “enclave” metaphor become apparent. For the social networks that link the inhabitants of the Hungarian world with one another also connect them to wider worlds—not only to the immediately surrounding Romanian world, but also, and in many ways more intensively, to the wider Hungarian world in Transylvania and in Hungary (and of course to more distant worlds as well). Most Cluj Hungarians, for example, travel to Hungary more frequently than to Transcarpathian Romania. Third, the spatial connotations of the enclave metaphor suggest an internal homogeneity; they invite us to imagine all Hungarians as equally “inside” its borders. In fact, as our portraits suggested, degrees of participation and encapsulation vary widely. While Zsolt and Kati live largely within the Hungarian world, Karcsi’s granddaughter Ági and Mari’s son Zoli live almost entirely outside it. Karcsi himself, his nationalist bluster notwithstanding, worked and now socializes largely outside the Hungarian world. Mari, like Karcsi, grew up in a much more Hungarian Cluj, and attended Hungarian schools, but she, too, worked most of her life in a mixed setting, and at the time of our fieldwork was living in an ethnically mixed household. The Hungarian world, then, is neither a fully parallel world, nor an enclave, as these are ordinarily envisioned, though it combines elements of both. We begin our account of this world with a discussion of its institutional backbone, the comprehensive Hungarian school system, which makes it possible to study in Hungarian at all levels. We next consider the ways in which churches, workplaces, associations, and media extend the reach of the Hungarian world. We conclude by identifying a common logic, a common set of social processes and mechanisms, at work in each of these institutional spheres; and we show how that logic at once ensures and—at the margins—undermines the reproduction of the Hungarian world.

Schools As key agencies of socialization in the modern world, schools serve as important instruments of social reproduction—and of social transformation. But what they serve to produce, reproduce, or transform varies

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with the nature of the educational system. Integrated, centralized school systems like that of the French Third Republic contribute to producing and reproducing “the nation” as a single unified citizenry by propagating national culture, inculcating nationalist attitudes, and promoting linguistic standardization and assimilation. Religiously or ethnically segmented school systems, however, contribute to the production and reproduction of a segmented society.6 The curricular message and linguistic medium of minority-language schools can serve as bulwarks against the nationalizing state and as means of minority national—and even nationalist—socialization in their own right.7 The Romanian school system was highly centralized under Ceaus¸escu; despite decentralizing reforms in the 1990s, the Ministry of Education retains a high degree of control over the curriculum. Yet curricular centralization is compatible with ethnic segmentation. Even under Ceaus¸escu, the system was partly, although decreasingly, segmented along ethnolinguistic lines; since the change of regime, segmentation has increased. The latecommunist trend toward transforming Hungarian-language schools into mixed schools with Hungarian sections has been reversed; Hungarianlanguage vocational schools have been established; and opportunities for university-level study in Hungarian have expanded. We are interested here in the ways in which this increasingly comprehensive parallel Hungarian school system functions to produce and reproduce the Hungarian “world” in Cluj. In the first place, Hungarian schools inculcate a set of historical and cultural references that become part of the taken-for-granted stock of knowledge that all Hungarians share.8 They do so in part through the officially sanctioned study of Hungarian literature and Transylvanian Hungarian history; more important, perhaps, is the “hidden curriculum,” through which teachers may 6 On France, see Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, chapter 18; Nora, “Lavisse, instituteur national.” On the key role of a religiously and ideologically segmented school system in reproducing a segmented, or “pillarized,” society in the Netherlands, see Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation, 52ff. Of course, most schools also serve as key instruments of class socialization and reproduction. The elite English “public schools” are a classic example, but as sociologists of education have shown, even school systems that are more egalitarian in principle can contribute in important ways to the reproduction of class (see, for example, Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction). 7 This holds especially when minority-language schooling is backed by autonomous political institutions, as in Quebec or Catalonia. But minority-language schooling is important in other contexts as well. On Romanian and Saxon church schools as barriers against the Hungarian nationalizing project in the Dualist era, see Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration. For comparative historical perspectives on schooling in European multiethnic and multinational societies, see Tomiak and Kazamias, “Introduction”; Eriksen et al., “Governments and the Education of Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups,”; Kulczycki, School Strikes in Prussian Poland. 8 While the line of work inaugurated by Barth shifted attention from shared culture to boundaries in the study of ethnicity, a strand of recent work has sought to bring shared culture back in, without reverting to the objectivism of the older “culture-area” tradition. See for example Cornell, “The Variable Ties That Bind”; Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, chapter 8.

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depart from the prescribed curriculum in more or less subtle ways and often impart a distinctively Hungarian perspective on history. Some schools, moreover, are strongly imbued with a Hungarian nationalist ethos.9 All this plays an important role in ethnonational socialization. Yet this explicit and implicit socialization into a school-transmitted national culture and nationalist ethos is of secondary importance for our purposes. We are interested here in the reproduction of a distinctive Hungarian social world, not in the reproduction of Hungarian national culture or nationalist attitudes; although these are of course interconnected processes, their dynamics are analytically distinct. The linguistic aspects of the Hungarian school system are of greater importance for the production and reproduction of the Hungarian world. Although spoken competence in Hungarian is acquired in families, literacy is transmitted almost exclusively in schools.10 Without mass literacy in Hungarian, the tendency toward diglossia inherent in situations of asymmetric bilingualism would be greatly accentuated; Romanian would be used for all complex functions, interactions, and contexts, and Hungarian reserved for simple exchanges or informal contexts. It would be impossible to sustain newspapers, journals, literature, theater, churches, associations, or many other activities in Hungarian; it would be impossible, in short, to sustain any kind of modern mass public sphere.11 At higher levels, moreover, Hungarian schools transmit the specialized vocabulary needed for professional work in Hungarian, and therefore make possible the extension of the Hungarian world to the world of work. Yet while Hungarian schools, like minority-language schools in other settings, are crucial for the transmission of literacy and linguistically embedded cultural competencies, this point is widely acknowledged, and we will not dwell on it here. We will focus not on the linguistic but on the social-relational dimension of the Hungarian school system. We shall be concerned with the way social relations shape school choices, and 9 The principal of one of the three main Hungarian high schools in Cluj, a Catholic-affiliated institution with a history dating back to the late sixteenth century, was unequivocal in defining the school’s mission as that of reproducing the Hungarian nation in Transylvania. Criticizing efforts of some younger teachers to introduce a more liberal perspective in the classroom, he characterized the Hungarian school system as “a fundamental institution of Transylvanian Hungariandom. Here one cannot experiment [with a more liberal approach], one cannot consider this a laboratory” (interview, July 2003). 10 As Ernest Gellner has emphasized, mass literacy—not in the minimal sense of a basic knowledge of reading and writing, but in the fuller sense of mastery of a school-transmitted high culture—is basic to modern understandings of ethnocultural nationality. This is one of the central observations on which Gellner’s influential theory of nationalism is built; see Nations and Nationalism, chapter 3. 11 On the public sphere in the age of mass democracy, see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and, for less pessimistic appraisals, Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere.

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school choices, in turn, shape social relations, leading cumulatively to the reproduction over time of the Hungarian world. We begin by considering school choice: the question of how people enter the Hungarian school system in the first place. In the preceding chapter, we observed that Hungarian bilinguals seldom self-consciously choose what language to speak in different social contexts. They speak Romanian as a matter of course when addressing strangers in public, just as they generally speak Hungarian as a matter of course among themselves, even in publicly observable settings. “School choice,” too, is a potential misnomer. Few Hungarians discuss or consciously reflect on the advantages or disadvantages of Hungarian- or Romanian-language education; most take it for granted that their children should attend a Hungarian-language school. Over 85 percent of Hungarian children in Cluj enroll in Hungarian elementary schools. For most Hungarians, this is the unmarked or default option; it requires no explanation and occasions no comment. To the extent that Hungarians make choices concerning primary education, they most often concern which Hungarian school to attend, not whether the children should attend a Hungarian school. One Hungarian couple, for example, themselves educated in Hungarian through high school, were hesitating between the elementary school affiliated with one of the three prestigious Hungarian high schools in the center of town, which would require a bus ride and a fifteen-minute walk, and the Hungarian section of a less prestigious but more convenient neighborhood school, five minutes from their home. They opted for the former, continuing a family tradition; they did not even consider a Romanian-language school. Once in the Hungarian school system, the default option is to remain there, at least through the end of high school. Some children of mixed marriages, and a few others, may begin their schooling in Hungarian and then switch to Romanian for middle school or high school, but the large majority who begin in Hungarian continue in Hungarian, generally without even considering the option of switching to a Romanian school. This tendency has been reinforced since the change of regime by the increasing availability of secondary and post-secondary education in Hungarian, and by the possibility of taking university entrance examinations in Hungarian even if one is going on to study in Romanian at the university.12 Most Hungarian children, then, enter and remain in the Hungarian school system as a matter of course, without even considering Romanian schools. It is this lack of self-conscious choice that plays an important 12 At the university level, conscious choice—of institution, language, and field of study—is the norm; yet many Hungarians take it for granted that they will study in Hungarian at the university level as well (Fox, “Nationhood without Nationalism,” 87).

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role in sustaining the Hungarian world. There is a circular quality to this process. The taken-for-grantedness of Hungarian language education is on the one hand a consequence of the existence of a well-established Hungarian “world” in Cluj. Hungarian-language education for children is most fully taken for granted by those who are most fully encapsulated within the Hungarian world. But the taken-for-grantedness of Hungarian-language education is also a cause of the continued existence of the Hungarian world. Schools are the key link in the intergenerational reproduction of that world. Children enter the Hungarian school system as a consequence of their parents’ embeddedness within the Hungarian world.13 Education in that system, in turn, embeds the children just as firmly in the Hungarian world. Embeddedness in the Hungarian world, then, makes Hungarian schooling for children a matter of course; Hungarian schooling produces children who are both socialized and (more importantly) socially connected in such a way as to reproduce—without explicitly intending to do so—the Hungarian world in the next generation. This circular causality does not depend on direct ethnic socialization. Moments of self-conscious, sometimes heavy-handed ethnic socialization do occasionally occur in Hungarian schools, just as they occur in Hungarian churches, media, associations, and enterprises, as well as in some Hungarian families. But direct ethnic socialization is neither required to reproduce a stable Hungarian world, nor an especially effective means of doing so.14 Hungarian schools do not ordinarily foster a heightened sense of ethnicity. This is precisely the power of the Hungarian world, and of the school system in particular: the power to constitute a “natural,” unmarked world. As a number of scholars have argued, established nationstates have what might be called the privilege of invisibility: their nationalism goes unnoticed, unlike that of state-challenging nationalist movements.15 Our point here is that the institutions of ethnonational minorities possess a similar, though of course less comprehensive, power to “naturalize” a social world, to “unmark” ethnicity, to render it invisible. As we have observed in the preceding chapters, Hungarian is generally the marked, Romanian the unmarked category in Cluj. But within the Hungarian world, the marking relationships are reversed: Hungarian is the unmarked, Romanian the marked category. This is expressed, For survey data on this point, see Sorbán, “Tanuljon románul a gyermek.” Young Hungarians are notably resistant, for example, to the kind of direct, exhortatory ethnonational socialization found in the pages of Szabadság, the local Hungarian daily newspaper. For an account of the resistance of the younger generation in Ireland to ethnonational socialization, see Toibin, “New Ways to Kill Your Father.” 15 On “banal nationalism” as “endemic” yet largely unremarked in nation-states, see Billig, Banal Nationalism. 13 14

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for example, in the reversal of the usual expectations for addressing strangers: inside a Hungarian school, or in a “Hungarian” (that is, Catholic or Calvinist) church, one would ordinarily address strangers in Hungarian. The reversal of marking relationships is also expressed in a more general way. Hungarian schools are not experienced as marked or even, most of the time, as specifically Hungarian; children are not consciously aware of being in a Hungarian school, but simply of being in school. Hungarian schools are “Hungarian” in the first instance not by virtue of their distinctively Hungarian curriculum, or their distinctively Hungarian perspective on the matters taught. To be sure, Hungarian schools do sometimes convey, subtly or blatantly, a “Hungarian” perspective, especially on certain “sensitive” historical issues. More significant for our purposes than this overtly or covertly nationalist slant on the curriculum, though, is the nonideological Hungarianness of Hungarian schools. The decisive point about Hungarian schools is not that students are socialized by a Hungarian curriculum; it is that they are socialized into a Hungarian world—a world in which everybody speaks Hungarian, indeed everybody is Hungarian.16 The power of Hungarian schools to reproduce the Hungarian “world” depends less on their manifest or hidden curriculum than on the way they shape social relations outside the classroom. This is what enables them to serve as the organizational nucleus of the Hungarian world. The three major Hungarian high schools are particularly important in this respect. All schools, of course, shape extracurricular social relations, if only by providing a matrix for the formation of friendships and romantic involvements. Beyond this, the main Hungarian high schools seek to structure extracurricular activities in such a way that they remain within the Hungarian world.17 Besides sponsoring school-based extracurricular activities, the Hungarian high schools organize activities—parties, sporting activities, academic competitions, and summer camps—with one 16 Socialization into this taken-for-granted Hungarian world, of course, begins in the family (see Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 57–59, 64, 78 on the importance of primary socialization). For some students, ironically, the Hungarian school represents the first point of contact with the wider Romanian world, through compulsory Romanian-language classes. This was the experience described in a group discussion by an accountant in her late twenties. Growing up in an insulated Hungarian world, she did not know any Romanian; when she began studying Romanian in school, it was a “foreign language.” As it turned out, she had a good feel for the language, and she came to like Romanian language and literature very much. But she emphasized that this wider Romanian world was wholly new to her. Up to this point, she recalled, she had “simply looked at them, at Romanians, as if they were foreigners, since in our family everyone was Hungarian, our relatives were Hungarian, my preschool playmates were Hungarian, and so to me— I suddenly looked around [and said] ‘Romanian! Wow, how interesting!’ I mean, despite the fact that, well, here in Cluj the majority were Romanians.” 17 A deliberate effort is made to promote intra-Hungarian sociability among university students as well; see pp. 288–89, below.

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another, with other Hungarian schools in Transylvania and, occasionally, with “sister” schools in Hungary. Academic competitions, for example, were organized in the Ceaus¸escu era without regard to ethnicity. Students who attended Hungarian schools at the time recall participating in these competitions along with Romanians—first at the local level, then at the county level, and finally, for the select few, at the statewide level. These competitions were taken quite seriously, and participation was a matter of considerable pride, particularly for those who went on to the statewide competitions. Since the change of regime, however, academic competitions have channeled Transylvanian Hungarian students toward Hungary. Some Hungarian students continue to participate in Romanian competitions, but more participate in intra-Hungarian events, involving a first round of competition with other Transylvanian high schools and a second round in Hungary. Apart from this deliberate shaping of extracurricular social relations by schools, spontaneous sociability also follows patterns established in schools. There is a strong esprit de corps among students of each of the main Hungarian high schools, and school-based friendships are far more important than neighborhood-based ones. School-based networks, and high school friendship groups in particular, remain important later in life. Hungarians from Cluj who meet one another for the first time place one another by high school and year of graduation; this often leads to the discovery of a common friend or acquaintance. Periodic class reunions facilitate the maintenance of these networks; they are often attended even by those who have resettled abroad. Up to this point, we have concentrated on the way schools and the social relations they shape contribute to the self-reproducing quality of the Hungarian world. But not all Hungarians attend Hungarian schools;18 and not all of those who do attend Hungarian schools are fully encapsulated in a Hungarian world. About a quarter of Cluj Hungarians marry Romanians, and children of mixed marriages are more likely to attend Romanian than Hungarian schools, especially at the high school level.19 18 In 1999–2000, just under 15 percent of Hungarian children in Cluj were attending Romanian-language schools or sections in the first two years of elementary school, while somewhat more were attending Romanian-language middle and high schools. Data were obtained from the local office of the County School Inspectorate. Countrywide, in the middle of the 1990s, between 80 and 85 percent of Hungarian elementary and middle school students attended Hungarian schools, while about 75 percent attended Hungarian high schools (Varga, Fejezetek, 291–92). For trends in Hungarian-language schooling in Transylvania since 1989, see Papp, “A romániai magyar oktatás”; Murvai, A számok hermeneutikája. 19 We collected information on school attendance for twenty-six children of mixed marriages; of these, twenty-two attended Romanian-language high schools (six of them after attending Hungarian-language elementary and middle schools). We return to the issue of intermarriage and its contribution to intergenerational assimilation in the conclusion to this chapter (pp. 298–99).

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Apart from mixed families, some (usually less well educated) Hungarian parents choose to send their children to Romanian schools.20 Ági, as we saw in chapter 5, was sent by her grandfather—despite his nationalist inclinations—to a Romanian school so that she would have opportunities he did not himself enjoy. This was late in the Ceaus¸escu era, when opportunities for advanced study in Hungarian were very limited. A second case is that of Judit, who began school in a village in which schooling was available only in Romanian. When she was around thirteen, she was adopted by her mother’s sister and her husband, who had themselves moved from the countryside to Cluj in the 1960s to get a better education and stayed to work in the expanding industrial sector. Judit’s adoptive father had attended a Hungarian high school, but this had not helped him in his aspiration for social mobility; although he had hoped to become an engineer, he remained a worker. Judit’s adoptive mother had attended Romanian schools. Since Judit had begun her schooling in Romanian in her home village, it seemed natural for her to continue studying in Romanian, especially since she moved to Cluj just one year before she would have to take the high school entrance exams. As in the case of Ági, parental concerns about mobility and academic success explain the decision to have the child study in Romanian. A third child, Tibi, was also from a nonintellectual family: his father was a housepainter, his mother a nurse. His father grew up in TaˆrguMures¸, then almost exclusively Hungarian, and was educated in Hungarian; his mother studied nursing in Romanian. “My parents thought– actually it was my mother, she said she wouldn’t send me to a Hungarian school because we live in Romania and, from a practical point of view, when I have to earn my living, it will be easier for me if I know Romanian. And she was right.” Tibi’s mother not only insisted on a Romanian school, but spoke Romanian with him so that he would learn the language well. Tibi’s father agreed with this, but his paternal grandparents did not: “Of course my grandparents on my father’s side made a big deal out of this: ‘Why not [study] in Hungarian, at least through fourth grade?’ [They invoked] Peto´´fi, Ady, Bartók. But I had the curiosity and read them all; and especially Bartók, I listened to his music a lot so– it’s true, the Hungarian culture is very vast, rich, what can I say, it’s beautiful, but it’s not of any help to me in Romania.” Children from Hungarian families (and a fortiori those from mixed families) who attend Romanian schools are unlikely to become part of 20 A Transylvania-wide survey showed that Hungarian parents who send children to Romanian schools have on average less schooling, lower social status, and more close Romanian friends than parents who send children to Hungarian schools, and they are also much more likely to have attended Romanian schools themselves. See Sorbán and Dobos, “Szociológiai felmérés”; Sorbán, “Tanuljon románul a gyermek.”

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the Hungarian world. Their friends and partners are likely to be Romanian. Although Ági and Judit were teased in early grades for being Hungarian, by high school they were fully integrated into the wider Romanian world. Ági’s only Hungarian connection was to her family; while Judit maintained a Hungarian church affiliation as well, her friends, too, were mainly Romanian. Tibi preserved more Hungarian ties; he participated in writing and staging a rock opera at the Hungarian theater, and has dated Hungarian as well as Romanian women. Even those who grow up in Hungarian families and attend Hungarian schools are not hermetically sealed inside the Hungarian world. Although their friendship networks, shaped by Hungarian schools, are likely to be predominantly Hungarian, they are seldom exclusively so. Neighborhoods are a source of Romanian friends for younger children, as are mixed family connections for many Hungarians. At university, many who have attended Hungarian high schools enroll in Romanian lines of study or take some classes with Romanians.21 Although the pre-existing friendship networks of such students—especially those who grew up in Cluj— lead them to socialize mainly with Hungarian friends, some get involved with Romanian girlfriends or boyfriends. Workplaces also provide opportunities for friendships and sexual relationships to form across ethnic lines. Mari’s son Zoli, for example, attended Hungarian schools, but his workplace colleagues in a series of jobs have been mainly Romanian; he was hired for one job by a Romanian woman whom he later married. The Hungarian school system and the social relationships that it shapes provide the basis for a largely self-reproducing Hungarian world; but because that world is not tightly encapsulated, it is not fully selfreproducing. We return to this theme in the conclusion to this chapter.

Churches Like schools, and long before schools, religious communities have been important vehicles of social reproduction and transformation. This has occurred at various scales: supranational (Christendom and Islam), national (French Catholicism, English Protestantism), transnational (Judaism), or subnational (the United States). Like schools, churches have served both to reinforce the social, cultural, and political unity of religiously (relatively) homogeneous nation-states (such as France, Italy, or Sweden) and to perpetuate social, cultural and political divisions in religiously heterogeneous societies (as in Germany until the mid-twentieth century or the Netherlands until the late twentieth century). 21

On social relations among Hungarian university students in Cluj, see pp. 288–89.

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Where religious and ethnic boundaries have coincided, religion has helped ensure the survival of minority ethnic communities in polyethnic states. This has occurred through religious endogamy, which has served to reinforce ethnic endogamy; through restrictions on commensality; through religiously grounded differences in ritual practice and in the regulation of life conduct; and through institutions such as priesthoods and church-run schools, clubs, hospitals, and newspapers.22 Transylvania has a long tradition of religious pluralism as well as polyethnicity, and religion played a central role in ethnic boundary maintenance through the mid-twentieth century. It was able to do so because of the strong correlation between religious affiliation and ethnicity and the central role of churches as agents of socialization. Calvinists and Unitarians have been overwhelmingly, and Catholics very heavily, Hungarian; Orthodox and Greek Catholics, overwhelmingly Romanian; and Lutherans, overwhelmingly German.23 And while other denominations have made some headway since the change of regime, 94 percent of Clujeni declared an affiliation with one of the traditional “Hungarian” or “Romanian” churches in the 2002 census. In Transylvania, as elsewhere in Europe, education was long a monopoly of churches. The growth of state education in the late nineteenth century made religious schools all the more important in preserving ethnic boundaries. Hungarian state schools functioned—and were intended to function—as agents of Magyarization in the Dualist era; Romanian church schools served in this context as barriers against assimilation and as vehicles of Romanian ethnic reproduction.24 This role passed to Hungarian church schools during the interwar period, when Romanian state schools served as agents of assimilation.25 Religious sanctions against intermarriage were also significant in preserving and policing ethnic boundaries. To the extent that such sanctions discouraged prospective marriages between Catholics and Calvinists, and between Orthodox and Greek Catholics, they reproduced confessional boundaries among Hungarians and among Romanians; in 22 On the connection between religious and ethnic endogamy, see A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 123; on commensality, Francis, Interethnic Relations, 184, 396; on the central role of religion more generally in preserving ethnic boundaries, see, in addition to Smith, Ethnic Origins, Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism. 23 In Cluj, the correlation has not always been so close: on the divergence between declared affiliation with a “Romanian” religion and declared Romanian nationality in early and midtwentieth-century Hungarian censuses, see chapter 3, pp. 95–20, 102n45. For other qualifications, see Varga, Fejezetek, 249–51. The ethnonational identifications of Jews in Transylvania, as elsewhere in the ethnically mixed and nationally contested borderlands of Eastern Europe, have been much more complex, and have fluctuated over time; see for example Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe. 24 See Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration. 25 See Bíró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, part II, chapters 4 and 5.

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addition, religiously enforced endogamy indirectly reproduced boundaries between Hungarians and Romanians.26 During the communist period, the socializing power of churches was sharply curtailed. Church property was expropriated, and schools were taken over by the state. The Hungarian churches remained important as spaces where Hungarian could be spoken as a matter of course, in a setting that was free of state control; but without schools, their ability to reproduce the Hungarian world over time was severely compromised. Since the change of regime, churches have regained some of their power.27 Surveys have shown Romania to be among the most religious countries of the region.28 Many new churches have been built, or are under construction. Most of these are Orthodox, built with state support; but in Cluj new Catholic, Calvinist, and Greek Catholic churches are also under construction.29 Religious instruction has been reintroduced into state schools. Churches takes strong stands on some cultural and political issues; and Hungarian churches are major players in the field of minority politics. The Hungarian churches have recovered some of the property confiscated under communism.30 Restitution has strengthened the Catholic Church in particular, returning to its control a substantial amount of valuable real estate in the city center. The comparative wealth of the churches gives them a key role in shaping Hungarian enterprise and associational life. The Catholic Church, for example, provided funds to help establish a printing company that grew into one of the larger and more successful Hungarian firms; it rents prime retail space to a number of Hungarian enterprises. The churches also provide space—and sometimes other facilities—to Hungarian associations and initiatives.31 Often Hungarians who are starting an association or undertaking some initiative look to the churches as well as to foundations for support. When a group of Hungarian parents sought to organize a summer preschool program 26 The power of churches to enforce confessional or ethnic endogamy is much weaker today. We heard a few stories of Hungarian pastors refusing to marry ethnically mixed couples, and some Hungarian church officials have expressed concern about intermarriage in connection with a broader concern about assimilation, emigration, and the declining numbers of Transylvanian Hungarians. Yet on the whole, mixed couples seeking to marry in Cluj today do not face substantial obstacles from churches. 27 For overviews, see Iordachi, “Politics and Inter-Confessional Strife in Post-1989 Romania”; Flora et al., “Religion and National Identity in Post-Communist Romania.” 28 For comparative data on religious attitudes and practices in thirty European countries, see Halman, ed., The European Values Study, 12, 74ff. 29 See plate 17. 30 The Greek Catholic Church has also recovered some of the property it lost when it was banned in 1948; like the Hungarian churches, it continues to be embroiled in legal struggles over church property. 31 The church does not use all of its real estate to promote specifically Hungarian enterprises or activities; some is simply rented at market rates to whatever enterprise can afford it.

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to complement the school-year program provided by the state, for example, the Calvinist Church offered not only space but a teacher to work with the children. Other initiatives come from the churches themselves. The Calvinist Church runs a home for the elderly, a clinic for handicapped children, and a charity organization that provides social and educational activities for homeless street children. In a context in which capacities for social self-organization remain relatively low, the organizational and material resources of the churches give them a central role. Church affiliation rates are high; only a few decline to state an affiliation, or declare themselves atheists, at the census. The great majority continue to be baptized, married, and buried by the church. In Catholic and Calvinist churches, most children attend the required Bible course before the first communion or confirmation. Church attendance rates are somewhat higher among Transylvanian Hungarians than among Transylvanian Romanians (and considerably higher than among Hungarians in Hungary).32 Yet many attend church only on major holidays, while others remain members principally in order to qualify for church-provided services. Catholic and Calvinist churches in Cluj, for example, supply parishioners (and sometimes others) with medications obtained from “sister churches” abroad or through international faith-based charities. The Calvinist Church provides medical services (including home physician visits and medications) for a modest fee. Some churches receive used clothes, toys, and other contributions from affiliated churches abroad. Like schools, churches help reproduce the Hungarian world in three respects. They do so in the first place through direct ethnonational socialization. It is not unusual for sermons to address ethnopolitical issues or invoke national themes, especially at moments of heightened ethnopolitical tension, or around the time of elections, censuses, or national holidays. Many religious leaders regard the churches as having an expressly national mission; the best-known Transylvanian Hungarian political figure, László To´´kés, is a minister of the Calvinist Church, while the top Catholic official in Cluj, Árpád Cziriák, often speaks out about political issues affecting the Hungarian minority. Religious holidays are celebrated with national symbols, and national holidays with religious symbols and assemblies. Since 1989, for example, the March 15th Hungarian national holiday has been celebrated in part through a religiously ecumenical (but ethnonationally exclusive) service in St. Michael’s 32 This and other indicators of religiosity are reported in Tomka, “Jelentés a vallásosságról,” 19ff., which found that among 18–40 year olds, 50 percent of Transylvanian Hungarians attend church at least once a month, compared with 20 percent of Hungarians in Hungary, and about 40 percent of Transylvanian Romanians. A less detailed account in English is available in Tomka, “Religiosity in Transylvania.” Church attendance rates, however, appear to be considerably lower in Cluj than in Transylvanian villages.

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Church or in the main Calvinist church. Immediately after the change of regime, people started to sing the Hungarian national anthem at the conclusion of Catholic and Calvinist church services;33 they continue to do so on major religious and national holidays in most churches, and at the conclusion of services every Sunday at St. Michael’s on the main square. Second, even when they do not foster a heightened sense of Hungarianness, or propagate a religious message that is infused with national or nationalist content, churches (again like schools) provide a space where Hungarian is spoken, and where one associates with other Hungarians, as a matter of course—a space that is part of a taken-for-granted Hungarian world. Third, social relations established in church carry over into other activities. This has both an organized and a spontaneous aspect. Just as schools organize extracurricular activities, churches organize choirs, charitable activities, Bible study groups, women’s associations, and youth associations. Ilona, a middle-aged mother of two who works as an accountant in a recently privatized factory, came to Cluj in the early 1970s from a small town, where she had grown up in an observant Calvinist family, attending church regularly throughout the Ceaus¸escu era. When church-based social activities expanded after the regime change, she became an active participant, singing in the choir and working for the women’s charity group. Her older son, a math student in the Hungarian track at the university, attends the weekly youth Bible study class and helps the pastor organize sports and social activities that bring together young people from other Calvinist churches in Cluj. Her younger son, who attends a Hungarian high school, participates in church-organized sports activities and (along with his mother) attends a week-long church-sponsored summer camp for families. Ilona’s entire social life outside work is organized by the church, and her sons’ social lives are jointly framed by school and church. Relatively few, however, are involved in such church-organized activities.34 Like school networks, church networks also shape social relations in a more informal manner. We observed one telling example of this. Lajos, a frail young man in his late twenties, unable to hold a regular job because of a chronic illness, was interested in establishing a charitable organization that would help support poor, ill, and disabled Clujeni. His earlier charitable activities had been disillusioning: one enterprise turned out to be a scam; another involved an unreliable group of collaborators and 33 For an analysis of the rituals involved in singing the anthem and of its rich resonance for Hungarians, see Losonczy, “Dire, chanter et faire.” 34 Data gathered from representatives of Catholic and Calvinist churches indicate that no more than 10 percent of the members of any church, and on average fewer than 5 percent, are involved in any church-sponsored activity.

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undertook no serious activity. To find reliable and committed partners, Lajos turned to his church networks, including people he knew personally from his own Catholic church and others he knew by reputation as active in other local churches. And though he was looking for active church members (as an indicator of moral seriousness), rather than for Hungarians, the initial group was entirely Hungarian, since his networks extended only to Catholic and Calvinist, that is, to “Hungarian” churches. The initial group included teachers, nurses, and an accountant, and Lajos was confident they could eventually recruit some doctors as well. In order to formally constitute and register the group, however, the most immediate need was for legal expertise. Since his church-based networks did not yield any lawyers, Lajos advertised in local papers. Two young women responded, both, as it turned out, Romanian. Lajos’s undertaking nicely illustrates the social-relational infrastructure of the Hungarian world. The ethnic homogeneity of church-based networks, like that of school-based networks, arises not from selfconscious ethnic selectivity or preference on the part of individuals, but from the embeddedness of the networks in an institutionally defined Hungarian world. At the same time, the fact that Lajos had to look beyond his church-based Hungarian network to find legal expertise illustrates the limits of the Hungarian world.35 Given the close correlation between religious affiliation and ethnicity, churches contribute to the production and reproduction of the Hungarian world—and to the making of Hungarians.36 But their power to do so is limited. Most young Hungarians remain church-affiliated; but many affiliates attend church only occasionally; and even among regular attendees, few participate intensively in church-related activities. Although churches and schools shape social relations in similar ways, they do not do so to similar degrees. Notwithstanding their comparative wealth, churches do not have the power that schools have to reproduce the Hungarian world over time. Schooling is not only universal; it is pervasive. It 35 When the search for lawyers led outside the Hungarian world, Lajos was a bit concerned that the two Romanians might not feel at ease in an otherwise entirely Hungarian group. He was relieved to discover that the lawyers did not mind, and that they were willing to volunteer their services. Still, their presence at meetings did pose certain practical interactional problems concerning what language would be spoken; see chapter 8, p. 256. 36 The traditional “Hungarian” and “Romanian” churches face increasing competition from Pentecostals, Baptists, Adventists, and other churches, whose members account for about 5 percent of the population of Cluj according to the 2002 census. Baptists and Adventists organize parallel services and Bible study groups in Hungarian and Romanian, and therefore shape social relations like the traditional Hungarian churches. Pentecostals, Jehova’s Witnesses, and others generally draw people into the wider Romanian world or into an international world. Their cross-border ties link them not to Hungary, but, most often, to the United States; American missionaries are a familiar sight in town.

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occupies a large fraction of the time of most young people for at least twelve years, and school-based friendships often significantly shape later patterns of sociability. Church-based friendships shape sociability in other domains only for those few Clujeni who, like Lajos and Ilona, are deeply involved in church-sponsored activities.

Workplaces In some settings, ethnic enterprise is the institutional backbone of ethnic communities.37 This is not the case in Transylvania. The Hungarian world is founded on the school system, and ethnic enterprise, like churches, has a decidedly secondary, supplementary role. Under communism, of course, there was no ethnic enterprise per se, and no Hungarian workplaces outside the cultural sphere (Hungarian schools, theaters, newspapers, and publishing houses). A Hungarian business sector has emerged since 1989, but it remains relatively small.38 Enterprises remain a weak link in the chain of institutions that make up the Hungarian world. Work, like schools, is experientially pervasive. Friendships formed at work, like those formed at school, often carry over into other domains; and work affords opportunities to find partners or spouses. A well-developed Hungarian economic sector would therefore substantially extend the reach or “institutional completeness” of the Hungarian world; Hungarians would be able to live the great bulk of their everyday lives within confines of the Hungarian world.39 It would also provide employment opportunities for students who have received vocational, technical, or professional education in Hungarian; these opportunities, in turn, would increase the incentive to pursue such education in Hungarian, thus strengthening the social basis for the reproduction of the Hungarian world. For a review of recent work on ethnic enterprise, see Light, “The Ethnic Economy.” We distinguish ethnic enterprise from the broader notion of the ethnic division of labor. Since town dwellers in Cluj and elsewhere in Transylvania (as in Eastern Europe as a whole) were for centuries ethnically distinct from surrounding peasant populations, the ethnic division of labor was a central and enduring fact of Transylvanian history. Even under Romanian rule in the interwar period, Romanian migrants to Cluj (as to other Transylvanian towns) confronted an urban world in which Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Jews occupied leading positions in the urban economy. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, Romanian nationalists were centrally concerned to “conquer” the ethnically alien towns and to overcome the traditional ethnic division of labor—a process that would take a half-century. Yet though there were both Hungarian and Romanian enterprises in interwar Cluj, these were not instances of “ethnic enterprise” in the ordinary sense of the term, which refers to nondominant minorities: Hungarians were a numerical majority in Cluj throughout the interwar period; and Romanians, while a numerical minority, had the backing of the state. 39 See Breton, “Institutional Completeness.” 37 38

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The large majority of Hungarians attend Hungarian schools; they attend Hungarian churches, albeit irregularly; they can avail themselves of a wide range of Hungarian-language media, and can participate in a wide range of Hungarian-language leisure activities and associations. Most have Hungarian spouses and socialize among Hungarian friends. But even if they wanted to work in Hungarian enterprises, they would have only limited opportunities to do so. Precise statistics are unavailable, but it is clear that only a relatively small minority of Hungarians are employed in Hungarian ethnic enterprises. To understand why the ethnic enterprise sector is not larger, it is useful to consider what sustains ethnic enterprise in other settings. In the United States, the constant replenishment of a captive low-wage labor supply through continued immigration is crucial for the ethnic business sector. Most second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants do not seek work in ethnic enclaves, but rather look for better opportunities in wider labor markets. In Cluj, as elsewhere in Transylvania, the absence of a captive labor force makes it difficult for ethnic enterprise to flourish. Hungarian entrepreneurs cannot draw on a coethnic immigrant population that is confined by citizenship, precarious immigration status, or lack of knowledge of Romanian to the ethnic sector, and therefore willing to work for substandard wages. Since the great majority of working-age Hungarians in Cluj are more or less proficiently bilingual, they have access to the general labor market (as well as to the job market in Hungary, and, for some, to wider international labor markets). To be sure, graduates with vocational or professional training in Hungarian may not in fact be competitive, for linguistic reasons, in the wider Romanian job market. But this applies mainly to intellectuals, broadly understood; at lower levels, where most jobs do not require a highly sophisticated command of Romanian, it is less likely to matter. Other things being equal, many or most Hungarians would probably prefer to work in a Hungarian firm, if only because they are more comfortable speaking Hungarian; but they are in no sense a captive workforce. Like ethnic schools and churches, ethnic enterprises can have a national—and even nationalist—content or mission. In some settings, including much of East Central Europe from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the promotion of an ethnically exclusive business sector has been central to nationalist politics, and some business enterprises have been imbued with nationalist zeal. This has not been the case in post-Ceaus¸escu Romania, where nationalist politics has focused overwhelmingly on education, culture, and language, while ethnic enterprise has not been noticeably nationalist in inspiration. Some currents within the DAHR subscribe to the long-standing nationalist ideal of economic autarchy; they believe that the future of the Hungarian

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community in Transylvania depends on an independent, self-sufficient Hungarian economy. Most, however, regard the ideal of autarchy as obsolete under conditions of economic globalization.40 Hungarian entrepreneurs, for their part, have been guided by pragmatic considerations, not nationalist commitments. We know of no business in Cluj that developed from an ideological commitment to create a self-sufficient Hungarian economic sector. Rather, ethnic enterprise emerges through a series of pragmatic choices. When Hungarians start a business, they do not usually think of it as a Hungarian business, any more than Romanians who start a business think of it as a Romanian business. For those who seek partners in a business undertaking, trust is paramount. Since trust is embedded in friendship and family relationships, and since the Hungarian school system and relatively high levels of ethnic endogamy mean that friendship and family relations are largely intraethnic, Hungarians are likely to turn to other Hungarians as business partners.41 Similarly, when they look to hire employees, most Hungarian entrepreneurs do not look in the first place to hire Hungarian employees, but rather to hire those they know and trust. Like Romanians who start their own small businesses—or like Lajos starting his charitable organization—Hungarians ordinarily begin by hiring family members, friends, former classmates, or colleagues. Insofar as these networks tend to be organized—not deliberately, but because of their institutional embeddedness—along ethnic lines, the business, too, can be seen as “ethnic.” Or at least it can be so seen from the outside, though this is not necessarily its subjective meaning to the owners or workers: like Hungarian schools and churches, Hungarian workplaces are not experienced, for the most part, as specifically Hungarian.42 As an enterprise grows, to be sure, ethnicity—or more specifically language—can become a self-conscious consideration. One small software company was started by a Hungarian computer science graduate and grew through networks to include about ten employees, all Hungarian. At this point the firm hired a Romanian programmer. Doing so seemed “natural” ( just as it had seemed natural to begin by hiring acquaintances, who happened to be Hungarian); the owner had not 40 See the debate in Magyar Kisebbség, nos. 2–3 and 4, 1999. The DAHR has made a few modest gestures toward supporting Hungarian entrepreneurs, and the government of Hungary has provided modest financial support as well, but neither has made the development of a Hungarian economic sector a priority. 41 We know of a few cases in which a Hungarian entrepreneur sought out a Romanian business partner to facilitate interaction with the authorities. 42 When we asked Hungarian entrepreneurs if they knew other Hungarian firms, they were not able to respond readily, for they were not accustomed to categorizing firms as “Hungarian” or “Romanian.”

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thought of the firm as ethnically exclusive in any way. Yet when the new employee joined the firm, everyone became more self-consciously aware of ethnicity and language. The existing employees were conscious of having to make an effort to speak Romanian so as to integrate the new colleague, while the new colleague was aware of being excluded when Hungarian was spoken. Up to this point, we have spoken of ethnic enterprise without seeking to define it. Yet the concept is by no means unambiguous. Three types of ethnic enterprise in Cluj can be distinguished. The first provides an ethnic product to an ethnic clientele. This is characteristic of the cultural sphere (Hungarian newspapers, theaters, schools, folk dance ensembles, and so forth). It is the only kind of ethnic “enterprise” that existed— albeit not on a profit-making basis—in the Ceaus¸escu era; except for newspapers, such undertakings remain largely nonprofit.43 The second provides a non-ethnic product or service to an ethnic clientele. This is characteristic of services that involve either complex forms of communication (child care, counseling, and some medical and legal services, for example)44 or networks of personal referrals (for plumbers, auto mechanics, painters, carpenters, and the like).45 The third provides a nonethnic product or service to a non-ethnic clientele. In Cluj, as elsewhere, it is this third type that has the greatest potential for growth. Such enterprises are “ethnic” by virtue of their predominantly Hungarian workforce, the prevailing use of Hungarian in the workplace, or both.46 43 Schools and newspapers involve “ethnic” products only in a qualified sense; they are of course linguistically ethnic, but not (necessarily) ethnic in terms of their content. 44 To the extent that language is constitutive of the product, and not simply a neutral vehicle in which a nonlinguistic product is delivered, and to the extent that subtleties of language are important, so that “the same” product could not be delivered in Romanian, this can shade over into an ethnic or at least quasi-ethnic product. When one buys something at a store, one can clearly distinguish the product from the linguistic exchange through which the transaction is accomplished. For some forms of medical, legal, pastoral, or psychological advice, on the other hand, it is difficult to distinguish the product from the linguistic vehicle in which it is delivered. 45 Coethnic referral networks for such services help to expand the scope of the Hungarian world beyond the Hungarian institutions on which we focus here. We return to this point in the conclusion to the chapter. In keeping with the broader argument of the chapter, we note that such referral networks need not be self-consciously ethnic to contribute to the reproduction of the Hungarian world. Referral networks work on the basis of trust; and in a society like Romania, where levels of generalized trust are strikingly low, trust tends to be embedded in friendship and family ties. To the extent that these are relatively ethnically homogeneous (chiefly as a result of ethnically segmented school systems), referral networks will tend to follow ethnic lines without anyone intending for this to happen. In addition, of course, some Hungarians may specifically seek out a referral to a Hungarian service-provider, whether for linguistic reasons, or on the basis of ethnicized beliefs about reliability, diligence, or skill. On trust, see the results of a 1999–2000 cross-national survey, reported in Halman, The European Values Study, 44: only 10 percent of people in Romania agreed that “most people can be trusted,” substantially fewer than in any of thirty other European countries. 46 The ethnicity of the owner is a further criterion of ethnic enterprise; but the ethnicity of the workers and the language of the workplace are more important in helping to sustain a Hungarian world.

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Being able to speak Hungarian as a matter of course is the experiential foundation of the Hungarian world. This holds for workplaces as it does for schools and churches. Hungarian can be spoken in occasional interactions in most workplaces (during breaks, for example, or when Hungarians happen to be working together and others are not present). But this is quite different from being able to speak Hungarian unselfconsciously as an unmarked, default language; it is the latter that is possible in Hungarian enterprises. It is the ethnic composition of the workforce, of course, that determines the range of workplace situations in which it is possible or “natural” to speak Hungarian. But there is a social-relational dimension to the ethnic composition of the workforce that is partly independent of the language spoken in the workplace. One of the larger Hungarian enterprises in town, for example, is a used-clothing business with several hundred employees. The workforce is almost entirely Hungarian. For those who work in the warehouse sorting and pricing clothes, the default language is Hungarian; for those who deal with customers in the network of retail stores, however, it is Romanian (though they can switch to Hungarian if customers—many of whom know this is a Hungarian business— address them in Hungarian). Although the storefront employees speak mainly Romanian at work, the ethnically homogeneous workforce means that the friendships they form with co-workers will keep them within the Hungarian world.

Associations Voluntary associations have long been an important domain for the organization and enactment of ethnicity and nationhood.47 In Central and Eastern Europe, historians have shown how a wide range of associations— amateur scientific societies, reading clubs, choral groups, gymnastics associations, sports clubs, dance and folk music groups, archaeological and geographical societies, touring groups, social clubs, charitable organizations, youth organizations, fraternities, theater groups, foundations, scouting organizations, veterans’ associations, and others—were key sites for the cultivation and diffusion of understandings of ethnocultural nationhood in the nineteenth century; some became important protagonists 47 The tendency to idealize associational activity and to identify civil society with “civic” (as opposed to “ethnic”) forms of nationalism has obscured this point; but recent work by social scientists and historians has recognized the centrality of associational life to all forms of ethnicity and nationalism, including intolerant, xenophobic, and violent forms. See, for example, Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic”; Stamatov, “The Making of a ‘Bad’ Public.”

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in national struggles in the later part of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries.48 Like schools and churches, associations can be—and often have been—the vehicles for expressly nationalist projects. Some associations, for example, are founded for the explicit purpose of preserving an ethnic or national heritage, recording an ethnonational history, promoting or reviving a national language, performing ethnic or national music or dance, or cataloging ethnonational folklore; this aim is especially important for associations that seek to preserve or promote the culture of ethnonational minorities, since that culture usually lacks powerful state support.49 Yet here, too, we are more interested in social-relational and linguistic form than in ethnic or national content. We are interested, that is, in the way associations can bring people together along ethnic lines and thereby extend the reach of the Hungarian world, providing another social space in which one can speak Hungarian and associate with other Hungarians as a matter of course. This holds even for associations whose activities have no ethnic or national—let alone nationalist— orientation. Hungarians interested in exploring the many caves in the vicinity of Cluj, for example, can do so with a “Hungarian” spelunking association that exists alongside two other local caving groups. Most associations are small, and many exist only on paper.50 But a few Hungarian associations—like Hungarian schools, churches, and enterprises—shape social relations beyond the associational activity itself, increasing the probability that Hungarians will encounter other Hungarians in other settings. The most important is the Hungarian Student Association of Cluj (HSAC), which brings together Hungarian students from all the city’s universities, including those who are not studying in Hungarian “lines,” and therefore not structurally embedded in a Hungarian social milieu.51 The HSAC organizes a major dance to welcome new 48 From a large literature, see illustratively the following: on nineteenth-century Transylvania, Török, “The Informal Politics of Culture”; on radically nationalist associations in interwar Romania, Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, chapter 7; on the Baltic region, Hackmann, “Voluntary Associations and Region Building”; on Bohemia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; on late nineteenth-century Pozsony (today’s Bratislava), Babejová, Fin-de-siècle Pressburg, 60–76. 49 Ethnic minority associations are sometimes understood as a privileged locus for equality and freedom, providing a sphere in which members of ethnic minorities are sheltered from the inequalities they experience in the wider society of the nation-state. See for example Papp, “The Concept of Civil Society in the Romanian Press,” 166. 50 This is true of the region as a whole; see for example Miszlivetz and Jensen, “An Emerging Paradox,” 84–85. 51 In most faculties at Babes ¸ -Bolyai University, students can choose either Romanian or Hungarian “lines.” About two-thirds of Hungarian students at the university—and about half of all Hungarian university students in Cluj—were enrolled in Hungarian lines in 1999–2000 (there are no Hungarian tracks at the Technical University, Cluj’s other major university). In principle, the language of instruction in Hungarian lines is Hungarian; in practice, shortages of qualified

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students each year. The event is advertised in Hungarian; the default language is Hungarian; and much of the music—to which the students not only dance enthusiastically but sing along en masse—is Hungarian. By drawing together more than a thousand Hungarians, the dance powerfully demonstrates to incoming students the existence of a vibrant Hungarian social world. The HSAC also organizes movie screenings (often American films, but dubbed or subtitled in Hungarian), art exhibitions, other dances and parties, and a weekend festival each spring. Apart from social activities, the HSAC gives incoming students maps of the city that show Hungarian street names as well as the official Romanian names and maintains listings for students seeking roommates in flats or dorms. Another large and active association is the Transylvanian Carpathian Association (TCA), a touring organization founded in the late nineteenth century and re-established after 1990. The TCA (which has affiliates in other Transylvanian towns) has some three hundred dues-paying members in Cluj, most of them middle-aged and elderly. It organizes day trips each Sunday, longer excursions twice a year, and an annual summer camp that brings together about a thousand participants—Hungarians of all ages from different parts of Transylvania along with members of affiliated associations in Hungary. Like many touring associations, historically, the TCA is committed to the nationally tinged and sometimes nationalist idea—and ideal—of szülo´´földünk megismerése (“getting to know our native land”). The “native land” in question is understood as Transylvania, not Hungary; but all TCA activities are organized in Hungarian and for Hungarians.52 Associations’ ties to other institutions within the Hungarian world are strong, while their ties outside that world—to central and local government agencies, mainstream media, and Romanian associations—are weak. Hungarian churches and the DAHR provide space and other support for Hungarian associations, and church and party figures are involved in the leadership of most associations.53 The Cluj office of the TCA, for example, is in an historic building in the center owned by the Catholic Church. And the DAHR—which functions not only as a political party, but also as an teachers mean that some coursework is done in Romanian together with Romanian students. On the HSAC, see Fox, “Nationhood without Nationalism,” 119–23. The HSAC reported nearly two thousand dues-paying members in 1999–2000 out of a total Hungarian university student population of about seven thousand; the number of students who participate in HSAC activities is much higher. Figures on those studying in Hungarian at Babes¸-Bolyai University are from the university’s “Buletin statistic” for 1999–2000. 52 On the connection between nationalism and tourism, see for example Pitchford, “Ethnic Tourism and Nationalism in Wales.” For historical studies of the connection between nationalism and tourism in East Central Europe, see for example Judson, “The Bohemian Oberammergau”; Judson, “Tourism, Travel, and National Activism.” 53 Horváth and Deák-Sala, “A Romániai magyar egyesületek és alapítványok,” 40–45.

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umbrella organization for all Hungarian organizations and associations— provides space for a number of associations. One is a club for older divorced or widowed men and women, whose members meet once a week, cook together, celebrate birthdays together, and sometimes invite local personalities to give a talk; the local DAHR office occasionally asks for their help in return in small ways, for example by mobilizing them to attend political functions. Many associations receive financial support from the Hungarian government, as part of its broader commitment to supporting Hungarian communities in neighboring states.54 There are limits, of course, to the organization of associational life along parallel lines.55 In many domains, one does not find separate Hungarian and Romanian associations; those interested in dog shows, stamp collecting, or taekwondo, for example, participate in a single association. The Hungarian world is much smaller than the surrounding Romanian world in Cluj; as a result, it cannot support the full range of associations found in the wider Romanian world.56

Media The media are widely recognized as an important vehicle for the shaping of national—and nationalist—subjectivities. Most obviously, the media can transmit and amplify expressly nationalist messages and can propagate national symbols and perspectives to broad audiences. But the media also help construct and reproduce nationhood in more subtle ways, having to do more with the form of the modern mass media than with the content of their message. Benedict Anderson has described the newspaper, like the novel, as a device for representing the nation as a “sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time,” consumed (nearly) simultaneously by thousands or millions of others in an “extraordinary mass ceremony.” And Orvar Löfgren has observed that the broadcast media contribute in an especially powerful way to the “nationalization of culture” in contexts—such as mid-twentieth-century 54 A survey of Hungarian NGOs in Transylvania found that 71 percent of their support came from abroad, predominantly from Hungary (ibid., 51–53). 55 Even where parallel Romanian and Hungarian associations exist, they are not necessarily “Romanian” and “Hungarian” in the same way. Romanian associations are usually less explicitly and self-consciously Romanian than the Hungarian associations are Hungarian. This reflects the asymmetry discussed above: Hungarian associations, like the Hungarian world generally, are understood as marked, Romanian associations, like the wider Romanian world, as unmarked. 56 We do not wish to exaggerate the range or density of associational activity in the wider Romanian world. Here, as elsewhere in postcommunist Eastern Europe, associational activity remains weak by comparison with that in Western Europe; for an overview and interpretation, see Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society and, on Romania, Ba˘descu, Sum, and Uslaner, “Civil Society Development.”

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Sweden—where a state broadcast monopoly ensures that almost all citizens listen to or watch the same programs at the same times, creating “common topics of conversation and frames of references” and “a national rhythm of listening.”57 Like schools and churches, however, the media can help create and sustain imagined communities that cut across as well as reinforce nation-state boundaries.58 This is the case in Transylvania, where the media (like churches, schools, and associations) have parallel Hungarian and Romanian forms. The many news kiosks that dot the main streets sell three Hungarian-language daily newspapers (one local, one regional, and one statewide) along with numerous Romanian-language local and statewide daily papers. Hungarian magazines—mainly imported from Hungary—are available as well, as are smaller-circulation cultural and political periodicals, published mainly with foundation support. Although parallelism is less fully developed in broadcast media, state television and radio channels provide some Hungarianlanguage programming, and a private Hungarian-language radio station was established in 2002 by the Calvinist Church (an earlier private local station, which had broadcast in Hungarian and Romanian, failed in 1997). Radio and television programming from Hungary, moreover, is easily received in Cluj. There is an elaborate Hungarian-language Web-based media as well, part locally produced in Transylvania, part produced in Hungary.59 What makes the Hungarian media Hungarian? Like Hungarian schools and churches, some (but by no means all) Hungarian media have an explicitly national, even nationalist mission. The local Hungarian daily, Szabadság (the name means “freedom”), has a nationalist editorial stance, and its news coverage and opinion pieces often concern local or statewide nationalist politics or the fate of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. And Budapest-based Duna TV was founded in the early 1990s as an expressly nationalist enterprise, broadcasting programming (such as documentaries on Hungarian history, performances of Hungarian folk music, and tutorials on proper Hungarian-language usage) designed to help transborder Hungarians preserve their culture 57 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26, 35; Löfgren, “The Nationalization of Culture,” 17. The primacy of form is asserted in pointed, indeed exaggerated, form by Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 127. For judicious criticism of Gellner and Anderson on this point, see Schlesinger, Media, State and Nation, 158–65. 58 See for example Price, Television, emphasizing the importance of distance-eclipsing, boundary-spanning, channel-proliferating cable and satellite technologies; see also Riggins, ed., Ethnic Minority Media; Husband, “General Introduction: Ethnicity and Democratization”; and Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. 59 For an overview of the Transylvanian Hungarian media, see Papp, “The Hungarian Press System in Romania”; for a critical analysis, see Magyari, “Hungarian Minority Media in Romania.”

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and national identity. In the words of one critical Transylvanian Hungarian commentator, the Hungarian media contribute to a “minority neurosis” by dramatizing and exaggerating the situation of Transylvanian Hungarians.60 In keeping with our analyses of schools, churches, enterprises, and associations, however, we are interested less in the expressly national or nationalist content or stance of some Hungarian-language media than in the indirect ways in which the media help construct and reproduce a Hungarian world. They do so in the first place, of course, simply by making available a broad spectrum of media content in Hungarian, and thereby extending the range of activities that one can undertake, unselfconsciously and as a matter of course, in Hungarian. Equally important, the locally produced Hungarian media provide the infrastructure for a Transylvanian Hungarian public sphere. Moreover, the Hungarian media provide material that is (with the large and important exception of entertainment) not only in Hungarian, but about, for, and by Hungarians. The news reported in the Transylvanian Hungarian press, for example, is skewed toward news about Hungarians; this holds not only for political news, but for reporting about culture, sports, social trends, and human-interest stories. The papers announce meetings of Hungarian associations, performances of Hungarian theaters, activities of Hungarian schools, schedules of Hungarian church services, and deaths of local Hungarians. They simultaneously describe and delineate a Hungarian world.61 A similar filtering occurs through the Internet. The news presented on the comprehensive Transylvanian Hungarian gateway site Transindex is less Hungarian-specific than the news presented in local and regional Hungarian newspapers. Yet the site’s cultural, recreational, institutional, and media links point mainly within the Hungarian world. The restriction in scope is not explained or justified; it is taken for granted. Transindex helps its surfers meet Hungarian partners, contact Hungarian associations, and find Hungarian jobs; it provides a virtual map of the Transylvanian Hungarian world.62 Naming, formatting, and framing can also subtly sustain a Hungarian world. By using Hungarian street and place names, rather than the official names, for example, Szabadság helps reproduce a shared unofficial mental map of the city that has subsisted through informal practices for Magyari, “Hungarian Minority Media in Romania,” 196. When Brubaker and Fox wanted to find a Hungarian friend who had moved since we had last seen him, we placed a personal advertisement in Szabadság. Alerted to the advertisement by a friend of his, our friend called us within a day or two. 62 See www.transindex.ro. There are also several online discussion forums for Transylvanian Hungarians. 60 61

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nearly a century.63 Or consider the weather map shown on Duna TV, and on the station’s website. The map of the Carpathian basin depicts the encircling mountains prominently, while state borders are not sharply marked; this symbolically reunites the politically divided Hungarian cultural nation within the “natural borders” of the Carpathians.64 In ways such as these, the Hungarian media not only represent but help constitute and reproduce a world that is predefined and taken for granted as Hungarian.65 This “world”-constituting power does not depend on an expressly nationalist mission or message. The Transylvanian Hungarian daily Krónika, for example, competes with Szabadság by appealing to younger readers with a livelier and more professional format, while the main state television channels from Hungary lack the transborder nationalist agenda of Duna TV. Yet they, too, contribute to the reproduction of the Hungarian world, as do the various hobby and lifestyle magazines imported from Hungary. Szabadság itself contributes to the reproduction of the Hungarian world in ways not necessarily intended by its producers.66 While some readers identify with the nationalist stance of the paper, others are indifferent or hostile to that stance. Even Zsolt and Kati, ensconced though they are in their Hungarian world, are contemptuous of what they see as the paper’s parochialism and amateurism. Others buy the paper for the sports scores, television listings, weather report, or classified ads. (Though it is ordinarily available at newsstands throughout the day, Szabadság sells out early in the morning on Thursdays, when television listings for the following week are printed.) Obituaries were mentioned 63 Street names in Cluj provide a rich field for the study of the relation between official and everyday nomenclature. Official names of many streets and squares changed a half-dozen times in the twentieth century: after World War I, in 1940, in 1944, in the early communist years, during the period of national communism, and after 1989. Present usage is like a palimpsest, a multilayered record of past names, with the use of a particular name depending not only on ethnicity but on generation, family tradition, length of residence in the city, and (sometimes) political stance. 64 For the weather map, see http://www.dunatv.hu/idojaras.html. Another subtly national formatting device is employed by Kossuth Radio, the main state radio station from Hungary, to which many Transylvanian Hungarians listen: the musical logo heard each hour on the hour consists of a few notes from a song that celebrates the life of the national hero Lajos Kossuth. 65 On the “routine ‘deixis’ ” through which the media “continually [point] to the national homeland as the home of readers,” see Billig, Banal Nationalism, esp. 105–27. The quotation is from p. 11. 66 This follows from a more general point: that the reception, interpretation, or mode of consumption of any cultural product cannot be deduced from the nature of the product itself or from the meaning imputed to it by its producers, but depends on the way in which it is appropriated by particular socially situated and culturally equipped interpreters or consumers. See for example S. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”; Griswold, “The Fabrication of Meaning,” and idem, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture”; Liebes and Katz, The Export of Meaning; D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, and “Coca-Cola.”

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by several older Hungarians as a major reason to buy the paper.67 Even for those unsympathetic to its nationalist editorial line, to read Szabadság is to participate in, and sustain in a small but significant way, the Hungarian world. Yet while Hungarians can in principle rely exclusively on Hungarianlanguage media, few do so in practice. As a result, few Hungarians are encapsulated in a purely Hungarian media environment. The uses ordinary people make of the media, here as elsewhere, are varied and inconsistent. Mari, for example, subscribes to Szabadság (mainly for television listings and obituaries), but watches Romanian news on a commercial Romanian channel and Hollywood films on any channel that shows them. More Hungarian university students buy the weekly local advertising paper and the statewide sports weekly—both in Romanian—than any Hungarian newspaper.68 Television viewing—more important than newspaper reading in any event—gravitates toward internationally produced entertainment. The simplest explanation for the lack of encapsulation in a Hungarian media world is that one need not commit oneself to media the way one does to schooling. There is no either/or choice between Hungarian and Romanian media such as there is for schools; instead, one can mix and match. This is particularly true for the electronic media. Few people buy more than one daily newspaper, but it is easy to tune into more than one television or radio station. And newspapers have lost ground to television since the regime change as inexpensive cable and satellite networks have provided access to a previously unheard-of range of programming, with channels broadcasting in English, Italian, Spanish, German, and French in addition to Hungarian and Romanian, and a considerable amount of international content broadcast on the Hungarian- and Romanianlanguage channels as well.69 “We buy a paper now and then,” reported a Hungarian worker in his fifties: “We used to subscribe to Szabadság, but since the price went up so much, we don’t any more. And now with all this television [that is, all the available channels], if we want to watch something, or find out what’s going on, we turn on the TV.” Hungarians (like Romanians) do not choose to watch one channel rather than another; they choose to watch certain programs. Given the choice of an American film with Romanian subtitles on a Romanian channel or Hungarian folk dancing on Duna TV, Mari would unhesitatingly choose the former. Some older Hungarians are confined largely to 67 This phenomenon has also been noted by Magyari, “Elemzések a romániai magyarok sajtóolvasási szokásairól,” 121. 68 Fox, “Nationhood without Nationalism,” 167–68. 69 International television programs are subtitled on Romanian channels and almost always dubbed on Hungarian channels.

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Hungarian-language programming by their minimal competence in Romanian. Yet for most Hungarians, strong preferences for content— shaped more by generation than by ethnicity—override mild preferences for linguistic form.70 Thus while the Hungarian media do help sustain a Hungarian world, for those who regularly read Hungarian newspapers, watch Hungarian TV, listen to Hungarian radio, or use Hungarian Internet gateway sites, they do so for the most part in an intermittent and partial fashion. Instead of inhabiting a relatively enclosed Hungarian media world like that formed by the Hungarian school system, most Cluj Hungarians, guided by tastes and preferences that are largely independent of ethnicity, participate in overlapping and shifting Hungarian, Romanian, and international media worlds.71

Conclusion The Hungarian world is small and tightly interconnected. People often know one another; when they do not, they can quickly place one another in familiar contexts and networks. And the institutions we have considered are interlocking. The Hungarian churches, for example, are closely affiliated with the three main Hungarian high schools. The churches are also closely connected to Hungarian enterprises, mainly by leasing to them the prime commercial real estate that they own in the town center; they provide space to many Hungarian associations as well. DAHR figures play leading roles in Hungarian associations. Social relations formed in one institutional setting, especially schools, carry over not only into private life but into other institutional sectors. Businesses, for example, are often formed by school or university classmates, as we saw in the case of Zsolt and his brother. Lajos founded his charitable organization by drawing on church contacts. One of the larger Hungarian businesses was started by someone who was the head of a Hungarian professional association established immediately after the fall of Ceaus¸escu, and who was also well connected to the Hungarian schools; this enabled the firm to use school property as a warehouse as it was getting started. The Hungarian world in Cluj is grounded in these interlocking institutions, the social networks they shape, and the shared experience they 70 Language comfort and competence matter more for print than for broadcast media (and of course matter more for some than for other print media). Most Romanian-language radio and television programming is easily understood by all but a small minority of elderly Hungarians. 71 For an overview of the state of the media in East Central Europe more than a decade after the regime changes, see Sükösd and Bajomi-Lázár, “The Second Wave of Media Reform.”

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make possible. But it is not exhausted by these.72 For individual Hungarians, the Hungarian world includes all settings and social relations in which they speak Hungarian, and encounter other Hungarians, as a matter of course. The scope and contours of this world vary from person to person—not only because Hungarians participate in different ways and to different degrees in the institutions we have discussed, and not only because their institutionally based social networks differ in shape and extent, but also because of their differing everyday routines. For many Hungarian students, for example, the Hungarian world includes dances at the Student Union that are organized by Hungarians and attract a largely (though not exclusively) Hungarian crowd. Similarly, for Zsolt and Kati, the Hungarian world includes the grocery store in their neighborhood. The store is not part of an institutionalized Hungarian world. Romanian is the default language, since most customers are Romanian. But Zsolt and Kati know that they can speak Hungarian with the owners and workers. For them (and for some other Hungarian customers), the store is part of the Hungarian world; for Romanian customers (and for those Hungarian customers who do not shop there regularly and do not know the owners or clerks), it is just a store.73 There are no doubt hundreds of places and persons who are part of these extensions of the Hungarian world—news kiosks, cafes, pubs, restaurants, market stalls, shops, doctors’ offices, hairdressers, and the individual people who work in these and other settings.74 Still, it is schools, churches, workplaces, associations, and media that comprise the core of the Hungarian world. Each of these institutional domains contributes to sustaining and reproducing that world in a somewhat different way. Yet at the same time there is a common logic— a common set of social processes and mechanisms—at work. 72 We have not considered, for example, the cultural sphere, with its state-supported Hungarian theater, opera, and puppet theater. For those who work in this sphere, these are Hungarian workplaces; but for the patrons, they represent another institutionalized part of the Hungarian world, analogous in some respects to media (in that one can mix and match and need not be encapsulated in the Hungarian cultural sphere), and in other respects to churches (in so far as they bring large numbers of Hungarians together for a collective ritual). 73 They become part of a particular person’s Hungarian world when that person comes to take for granted that Hungarian can be spoken there, at least in interactions with some people. The Hungarian world thus expands whenever one discovers new places in which, or persons with whom, Hungarian can be spoken, often by attending to the cues that we described in chapter 7. We experienced this in the course of our research, discovering numerous small businesses where Hungarian could be spoken. 74 In many cases, it is not the place as such that belongs to the Hungarian world in this extended sense, but particular people. Thus, a Hungarian may know he or she can speak Hungarian with one clerk in a store, though not with others. This is the case, for example, for the neighborhood grocery store where Karcsi’s granddaughter Ági works. For many regular Hungarian customers, who know they can speak Hungarian with her, interactions with Ági are part of their Hungarian world, while interactions with others who work in the store are not.

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In each domain, people make choices between institutionally defined alternatives.75 Some of these choices—we speak of “choice” in a large and loose sense, recognizing that explicit, self-conscious choice is not always involved—bring people more fully within the Hungarian world; others lead them out of that world. Some choices (of schools, churches, and workplaces, in particular) are relatively enduring; others (tuning in to a particular television program, for example) are ephemeral, and significant only as part of the larger pattern. In addition to the direct consequences of these choices—being drawn into or channeled outside the Hungarian world—some of these choices also have important indirect consequences. By shaping contact probabilities, networks of acquaintances, friendship patterns, and ultimately marriage patterns, the choice of school, church, workplace, or association can shape social relations outside these institutional spheres. The Hungarian world—and the Hungarian school system in particular—thus provides a powerful institutional matrix for ethnically patterned friendship circles and, crucially, for ethnic endogamy.76 Ethnically endogamous families and ethnically homogeneous friendship networks, in turn, constitute the social environment within which the next round of choices is made. They may even make choice unnecessary. For one who grows up in a Hungarian family, attends Hungarian schools, develops a largely or exclusively Hungarian network of close friends, and marries another Hungarian from a similar background, it is ordinarily a matter of course, not of self-conscious choice, to send one’s children to a Hungarian school. The process of institutional reproduction can thus become self-sustaining, as persons socialized within institutions that nurture a strong sense of a distinct Hungarian “world” associate with other inhabitants of that same world, find partners within the networks of friends and acquaintances shaped by its core institutions, and find it natural to channel their children into the same institutions. Yet the Hungarian world is not fully self-reproducing. Like the Hungarian population of Transylvania as a whole, the Hungarian population of Cluj has been shrinking. Between 1992 and 2002 it declined not only in absolute numbers but also as a fraction of the population, from 23 to 19 percent. Demographers attribute this decline to emigration (especially to Hungary), on the one hand, and assimilation, on the other.77 Both 75 The centrality of socially consequential choices between socially structured alternatives is highlighted in Arthur Stinchcombe’s attempt to codify the logic of Robert Merton’s sociological theory (Stinchcombe, “Merton’s Theory of Social Structure”). 76 For a review of sociological work in this area, see McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, “Birds of a Feather.” 77 For preliminary demographic analyses of the 2002 census, see the studies cited in chapter 4, p. 159n145.

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processes highlight the limits to ethnic reproduction, albeit in very different ways. High rates of emigration from Romania in the 1990s were not confined to Hungarians. Thanks largely to substantial net emigration, the population of Romania as a whole declined by nearly 5 percent between 1992 and 2002. Yet evidence does point to a disproportionate Hungarian share in emigration.78 This results primarily from the proximity of Hungary, the persisting economic gap between Hungary and Romania, and the dense ties linking Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary. Paradoxically, the Hungarian world may contribute to this emigration by strengthening transborder ties to Hungary (and weakening ties with the wider Romanian world). Hungarian schools, churches, firms, associations, and media all work in this direction. Secondary and post-secondary education is particularly important in this connection, preparing students for work in Hungary as much as it does for work in the small Hungarian ethnic economy in Transylvania.79 As far as assimilation is concerned, the key role is played by intermarriage.80 As we observed above, the Hungarian world provides a powerful organizational and social-relational foundation for ethnic endogamy, while endogamy, in turn, helps reproduce the Hungarian world in the next generation. Yet given the imperfect encapsulation of the Hungarian world—especially the lack of residential segregation, the prevalence of mixed workplaces, and the fact that only about half of Hungarian university students are studying in Hungarian tracks—Hungarians are always exposed to persons outside their ethnically homogeneous schoolbased friendship circles. And the logic of relative group size means that outside Hungarian institutional enclaves and the social networks they generate, Hungarians encounter far more potential Romanian than Hungarian partners.81 The result is mixed. On the one hand, ethnic endogamy contributes to ethnic reproduction; on the other hand, intermarriage contributes to assimilation. About three out of every four Hungarians marrying in Cluj marry other Hungarians; if ethnicity were irrelevant, one would expect 78 Ghet¸a ˘ u, “A romániai románok,” 210, estimates Hungarian and Romanian losses through emigration between 1992 and 2002 as 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively, of their 1992 population; the Hungarian share in emigration was no doubt even greater for the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there was a substantial wave of Transylvanian Hungarian resettlement in Hungary. On the migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary, see chapter 11, pp. 326ff. 79 We return to this theme in the epilogue. 80 For a detailed study of assimilation among Transylvanian Hungarians, drawing on 2002 census data, see Szilágyi, “Az asszimiláció és hatása a népesedési folyamatokra.” 81 For a general argument about the significance of relative group size, see Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity, chapter 2.

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(based on relative group size) the figure to be about one out of five.82 Yet intermarriage is frequent enough—affecting one in four Hungarians who marry and 40 percent of all marriages involving Hungarians—to erode the Hungarian world at the margins.83 Children of mixed marriages are unlikely to study in Hungarian, especially at the high school and university levels; unlikely, as a result, to develop predominantly Hungarian circles of friends; unlikely to marry Hungarians; and unlikely, in short, to be drawn into the relatively closed Hungarian world. Mixed marriages lead intergenerationally to assimilation more often than not, and assimilation is most often in the direction of the wider Romanian world; most children and grandchildren of mixed marriages come to identify themselves as Romanians.84 In this way, marriage works both to reproduce the Hungarian world and to limit the scope of that reproduction. Still, it is significant that the Hungarian world has managed to persist at all in the age of the nation-state, over the course of nearly a century of Romanian rule, and despite the steady Romanianization of the town. Politics and policies are of course crucial to explaining this persistence. As we showed in Part One, the Romanian communist regime, inspired by Leninist nationality policy, not only tolerated but (for a brief period) promoted separate Hungarian institutions; not even the strongly nationalizing Ceaus¸escu regime sought to abolish the Hungarian school system (though it did seek to erode it, especially at the high school and university levels). And since 1989, under pressure from the “international community,” Romanian governments have presided over the expansion of Hungarian-language education. Without a comprehensive Hungarian-language school system, the Hungarian world we have described could not exist. Yet we have been concerned in this chapter not with the external conditions of existence of the Hungarian world, but with its internal functioning: with the quotidian social processes through which the Hungarian world reproduces ethnicity and, within limits, reproduces itself. The institutional spheres we have examined are to varying degrees sites of expressly or implicitly nationalist messages and projects. Examples in82 Marriage data were assembled by consulting the informational forms couples are required to fill out indicating, among other things, the nationality of each spouse. The forms, representing all marriages involving at least one Hungarian in 1999 and 2000, were consulted at the local branch of the National Commission for Statistics. 83 This represents a somewhat higher rate of exogamy than for Transylvanian Hungarians in general, of whom about 18 percent married non-Hungarians during the 1990s, representing about 30 percent of all marriages involving Hungarians. See Horváth, “Az etnikailag vegyes házasságok.” 84 Census data show that more than two-thirds of the children of Romanian-Hungarian mixed marriages identify their nationality as Romanian, while only a quarter identify as Hungarian. See Varga, Fejezetek, 304 (or, in English, Varga, “Hungarians in Transylvania”).

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clude overtly nationalist history instruction as well as a more subtly nationalist hidden curriculum in schools; sermons addressing the tribulations of magyarság (Hungariandom) in churches; associations’ efforts to bring Hungarians together or promote Hungarian culture; nationalist editorials in the Hungarian press; and DAHR efforts to knit together these institutional spheres and to expand the reach of the Hungarian world. Yet we have argued that the national or nationalist content of undertakings in these spheres is less important in sustaining and reproducing a Hungarian world from day to day than their social-relational, linguistic, and sociocognitive form or framing. The social-relational logic we have identified, based on the institutional shaping of contact probabilities, is independent of the cultural content of institutional activities, and independent of any preference for in-group association. This provides a social structural foundation for the Hungarian world. Similarly, linguistic form is independent of the content of communication. What matters, in enabling Hungarian institutions to constitute a “world” for those inside them, is less what is communicated than the simple fact that it is communicated in Hungarian—as a takenfor-granted, default language, not the marked language that it is in the environing world. Sociocognitive framing, finally, works through takenfor-granted assumptions about the domain of interest, naturalizing Hungarian history, Hungarian sports, or even Hungarian weather as matters of interest to Hungarians. The perspective developed in this chapter—linking institutional worlds, social networks, socially and culturally patterned choices, and taken-for-granted experience—provides a robust structural explanation for the day-to-day reproduction of the Hungarian world. The explanation does not require that ordinary Hungarians be committed to reproducing “the Hungarian community,” or even that they be particularly concerned about transmitting Hungarian language and culture to their children. Many are of course concerned about this; but reproduction can happen even in the absence of such commitment, simply as an unintended consequence of the accumulation of choices shaped primarily by social-relational factors and by the phenomenological taken-forgrantedness of a world in which people speak Hungarian not as a political project but as a matter of everyday practice.

Chapter 10




MIXINGS

The institutionally grounded Hungarian world that we examined in the preceding chapter is not all-embracing. Some Hungarians, as we observed, drop out of that world, while others—chiefly those who do not attend Hungarian schools—are not part of it to begin with. Even those who remain within the Hungarian world are not fully encapsulated by it. Neighborhoods are not segregated along ethnic lines in Cluj, nor are most workplaces, shops, clinics, or other public places. A substantial minority of Hungarians are married to Romanians, while many others’ extended families include some Romanians. In these and other settings, Hungarians and Romanians interact all the time.1 Yet for the most part, they do not do so as Romanians and Hungarians. Rather, they interact as friends and neighbors, colleagues and classmates, clerks and customers, lovers and spouses in ways to which, much of the time, ethnicity is irrelevant, or relevant only in indirect or attenuated ways.2 Although nominally interethnic, such interactions are not experientially interethnic.3 The “mixings” we address in this chapter are interactions that are experienced as mixed, not the much larger—and more widely studied— class of interactions that are nominally mixed.4 Experientially interethnic 1 Such interactions are much more frequent for Hungarians than for Romanians, as they necessarily are for any minority population; for the same reason, intermarriage rates are much higher for Hungarians. This is another important aspect of the asymmetries in Hungarians’ and Romanians’ experience of ethnicity. On group size and intergroup relations generally, see Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity, chapter 2. For survey data on interethnic contact in Transylvania, see Research Center for Interethnic Relations, “Ethnobarometer,” 312–13. 2 On the indirect ways in which ethnicity can matter, see the discussion in chapter 8, pp. 240–43, 264, of the linguistic, demographic, and political asymmetries that govern language use. 3 On the distinction between nominal and experiential ethnicity, see chapter 7, pp. 209–10, and the similar distinction drawn by Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 41, 56, 71–72, between nominal and virtual dimensions of ethnic identification. 4 Research on forms, degrees, and consequences of interethnic contact has been overwhelmingly concerned with nominally interethnic interaction. One strand of the literature, originating with Robert Park (“Our Racial Frontier”) is interested in interethnic contact as the first step on the road to assimilation. Another strand, first codified by Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, suggests that certain forms of interethnic contact, by generating new information and eroding stereotypes, can reduce prejudice, tension, and hostility. (For a detailed analysis and critique of this line of research, known as the “contact hypothesis,” see Forbes, Ethnic Conflict.) A third and quite different strand in the literature reacted against what Milton Gordon (“Toward a General Theory,” 88) called the “liberal expectancy”—that ethnic divisions would become gradually attenuated—by arguing that increased interethnic contact generates increased competition and

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interactions are best understood as moments within nominally interethnic relationships. Just as people can become (experientially rather than simply nominally) Hungarian and Romanian at particular moments and in particular contexts, so relationships can become (experientially) interethnic.5 We shall be concerned here with the ways in which ethnicity can “happen” in nominally mixed relationships, making them—at least momentarily—experientially mixed as well. One should keep in mind, however, that such relationships are most often governed by other frames of relevance, and that the ethnicity of the participants may then be invisible or irrelevant. Even when colleagues, neighbors, or strangers know—or become aware of—one another’s ethnicity, that knowledge does not necessarily inform or color the interaction. When one borrows milk from a neighbor, buys a newspaper, or engages in small talk at work, the background knowledge that participants belong to different ethnonational categories is often entirely irrelevant to the governing frame of the interaction. That ethnicity is experientially invisible or irrelevant in much nominally mixed interaction does not of course mean that it is structurally irrelevant. Even when ethnicity does not color the immediate experience of the interaction, the underlying political, ethnodemographic, and sociolinguistic asymmetries to which we have called attention throughout the book significantly structure everyday social relationships, for example by shaping the sociolinguistic norms and practices that we discussed in chapter 8. We discuss four ways in which nominally mixed relationships can become experientially mixed: through overt disagreement or conflict; through the self-conscious avoidance of ethnically marked or sensitive topics; through ethnically framed joking or teasing; and through the choice between institutionally defined and ethnically marked alternatives.6 We consider relationships between friends, colleagues, neighbors, conflict (see, for example, Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict). For the most part, the literature has adopted an externalist, objectivist understanding of interethnic contact, treating it as any interaction in which parties belong to different ethnic groups, regardless of the subjective meaning of that interaction. An important exception in the Transylvanian context is Biró and Gagyi, “Román-magyar interetnikus kapcsolatok,” which analyzes interethnic encounters—and subsequent intraethnic discussions of such encounters—in Miercurea-Ciuc, a Hungarian-majority town in the Szekler region. In the ethnomethodological and microinteractionist traditions, see also Day, “Being Ascribed,” 154, and Heyman, “The Problem of Locating Ethnicity in Talk.” 5 See chapter 7, p. 210. 6 Although we discuss these separately for expository clarity, they are intertwined in practice. Avoidance, joking and teasing, and choice between ethnically marked alternatives are often oriented to the possibility (or to some prior instance) of disagreement or conflict, while choices, before and after the fact, can become the object of disagreement and conflict, avoidance, and joking and teasing.

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and partners or spouses. Disagreement, avoidance, and joking are relevant to all of these relationships; choice between ethnically marked alternatives is primarily relevant to mixed families, since at certain junctures, decisions have to be made—about marriage ceremonies, children’s names, religious practices, language use, and schooling—in ways that make ethnicity “happen.” In addition to providing occasions for ethnicity to happen through disagreement, avoidance, and joking or teasing, then, mixed families generate moments of ethnicization through a series of structured choices.7 Disagreement and Conflict We begin with disagreement and conflict. Although this is not the most common way for nominally mixed relationships to become experientially mixed, the other practices we go on to discuss—avoidance, joking or teasing, and choice between ethnically marked alternatives—are oriented in part to the possibility of disagreement or conflict. It is therefore not only actual but potential disagreement and conflict that can make ethnicity relevant in mixed relationships. We observed above that most friendly interaction between Romanians and Hungarians is not experienced as interethnic. The same holds for disagreement and conflict. When Romanians and Hungarians argue, they argue most often as colleagues, neighbors, classmates, or spouses, not as Romanians and Hungarians. Thus while disagreement and conflict are chronically implicated in social life, including social relations between Romanians and Hungarians, most nominally interethnic disagreement and conflict is not experientially interethnic. Yet disagreement and conflict are more easily ethnicized than nonconflictual forms of interaction. This can happen in two ways. First, disagreements and conflicts—at least nonroutine disagreements and conflicts—are 7 Ethnically mixed marriage is the subject of a large literature in its own right. What makes a marriage mixed for purposes of most research is the nominally differing ethnic category memberships of the partners, not the subjective meaning attributed to them by the partners. We ourselves treated intermarriage in this way in the preceding chapter. We observed that marriage was a key site of ethnic reproduction, on the one hand, and assimilation, on the other, ethnic endogamy contributing to the former, intermarriage to the latter. And we showed how marriage patterns— endogamy and intermarriage—are at once shaped by, and shape in their turn, the structure of social relations that determines the scope and limits of the Hungarian world. Here we are interested in the ways in which marriages can come to be experienced as mixed, not in the social structural causes and consequences of intermarriage. We are concerned here with the moments and modalities in which ethnicity can “happen” in mixed marriages, not with long-term processes of ethnic reproduction or assimilation. Most of the time, intermarried couples do not interact as Romanians and Hungarians. Ethnicity is only intermittently salient as a governing frame. In this respect, marriage is similar to other nominally mixed relationships; we therefore treat mixed marriages here along with other mixed relationships.

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“marked” in relation to the unmarked flow of ordinary interaction. As a result, they call for explanation; and the idiom of ethnicity provides one readily available explanatory framework (though not of course the only one). Second, and more interesting for our purposes, a disagreement can become ethnicized, and the participants can “become” Hungarian and Romanian, in the course of an interaction, as identifiably “Hungarian” or “Romanian” moves and countermoves are deployed. In this case, ethnicity can serve as a productive interpretive framework; it can generate as well as explain disagreement.8 Consider for example the following conversation, in which Gyuri and Andreea (the mixed couple we introduced in chapter 6) begin in agreement, but slide quickly into an argument. They had been talking about the changes that occurred after 1989, and Andreea had observed that the only change for the better was that now people could express their opinions freely. Yet even this gain was not so unambiguous: Gyuri remarked that his wife had closed the door to the balcony when expressing her negative views of Funar: Gyuri: [addressing Brubaker and Fox] But my wife was afraid just now, she closed the door [to the balcony] so that no one could hear. Because she is still //afraid. Andreea: //Yes, because . . . Gyuri: Because she is still afraid, you saw it just now, to make sure no one could hear. Andreea: Of course. Gyuri: It’s still in her, that fear. Andreea: Of course, because people are mean, and Funar is capable of anything. Gyuri: You see? So . . . Andreea: That’s right. I hear so much about him and, well [to Gyuri], you see the sorts of things he does. Gyuri: It doesn’t matter if I see it. Andreea: You tell it better, //you tell it better Gyuri: //I read in the newspaper, in the press. Andreea: Okay but what they write in the newspaper, //that’s not— Gyuri: //One’s opinion— a Hungarian sees things differently than a Romanian, he says, “That’s right, of course”, he’s Hungarian, while my wife doesn’t— excuse me, but she sees things differently because, after all, she’s Romanian, and so is Funar. Of course, Funar says the sorts of things a Hungarian doesn’t like, “If you don’t like it here, then just leave, since you’re Hungarian, what do you 8

See chapter 8, pp. 262–63.

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want here anyway?” And he makes these sorts of statements all the time. Andreea: Well, you know how it is. Gyuri: It’s our nationality, our nationality and, okay— so in our family and among our relatives, there is no— no— we respect one another and there are no problems, but in general everyone keeps quiet so as not to offend one another, but if he [Funar] says things like this, and then it appears in the newspaper, and I read it, then it’s totally different. Andreea: Why? László To´´kés also made some [statements], things I didn’t agree with. Gyuri: For example, To´´kés //is asking for the return Andreea: //He’s an extremist, too. Gyuri: of church property. Andreea: He’s also an extremist, somehow. Gyuri: He just asks for example that they give back to Hungarians //what belongs to the Hungarians. Andreea: //Don’t defend him now, because I know that you’re defending him because— see, now you’re defending him. Gyuri: So, the fact that he’s asking for rights, that’s different. Andreea: But the way he [To´´kés] talks, //Gyuri! Gyuri: //Compared to [Funar’s] chasing the Hungarians out. Andreea: The way he talks, that too. Okay, you see it like that, everyone sees things differently. Gyuri and Andreea share a strong dislike for and distrust of Funar. Although they have not disagreed about anything, Gyuri introduces ethnicity by way of noting that he, as a Hungarian, sees things differently than his wife, “because, after all, she’s Romanian,” adding, gratuitously, “and so is Funar.” Ethnicity is introduced to explain differing points of view; but it in fact produces the disagreements it is ostensibly designed to explain. Having cast himself as a Hungarian, Gyuri is led to speak of the specifically Hungarian reaction to Funar, who “all the time” makes pronouncements that offend Hungarians, such as “If you [Hungarians] don’t like it here, then just leave.” Even as he goes on to say that Hungarians and Romanians “respect one another” and have “no problems,” he implies that problems lurk just below the surface: “everyone keeps quiet so as not to offend one another.” At this point, Gyuri’s persistently ethnicized talk provokes his wife into taking an ethnicized stance of her own. Andreea brings up László To´´kés—the leader of the more radical wing of the DAHR—as a Hungarian politician with whose views she disagrees. When Gyuri starts to defend To´´kés, Andreea goes a step fur-

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ther and characterizes him as “also an extremist” (that is, just like Funar). The argument is launched.9 In workplaces, ethnicized arguments are more frequent among men than women, and more frequent on the shop floor of factories than in offices (where sensitive issues are more likely to be avoided). This is a matter of gender and class habitus. Gyuszi, a forty-something Hungarian worker and union leader in a machine tool factory, reported that he and his colleagues “argue a lot, we bring up one or another HungarianRomanian problem. We don’t shy away from this. But where [his wife] works [in an office], if this kind of thing comes up, nobody says anything. Here we speak openly, we egg each other on, we retort in kind, we dish it out and we can take it.” Sometimes they speak jokingly, Gyuszi went on, but at other times they get angry. On one occasion, just before Christmas, the workers had been drinking a fair amount, and somehow the question of who settled first in Transylvania came up:10 One of my colleagues—in fact one of his ancestors was Hungarian [ . . . ] He was a bit drunk, and he says, “Whatever happens, I will always be against you.” And I say, “Why?” “Because you’re Hungarian and I’m Romanian.” He said it openly. And then this came up, that the Romanians were here first. I say, “Prove it, buddy. The Daco-Roman theory is just a theory! No one has proved it. Name one leader of Transylvania who was a Romanian.” “King Matthias!” “He wasn’t Romanian!” I say. “Do you know who his mother was? Szilágyi Erzsébet.” “Yeah, sure, but his father was Iancu de Hunedoara.” “It wasn’t Iancu de Hunedoara, it was Hunyadi János, he was Hungarian, too.”11 Can you imagine that the Hungarians would have taken a Romanian for their king? Voices were raised, and passions aroused, but not with lasting consequences: “It was the pálinka [homemade plum brandy] talking. We argued, and that was it.” Occasionally the use of pejorative ethnic labels generates an argument. Balázs, a Hungarian auto mechanic, recalled an episode in which a Ro9 In the continuation of the discussion quoted here, Gyuri went on to remind Andreea that it was To´´kés who sparked the uprising in Timis¸oara that led to the fall of Ceaus¸escu in December 1989. Andreea flatly denied this and then, in full argumentative mode, switched to Romanian (the conversation having proceeded in Hungarian up to this point). 10 On Transylvanians’ considerable knowledge of and—at some level—identification with contending Romanian and Hungarian theories regarding early Transylvanian history, see Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 93–105. 11 Iancu de Hunedoara and Hunyadi János are Romanian and Hungarian names of the same person. King Matthias’s paternal ancestry was in fact “Romanian,” his maternal ancestry “Hungarian,” though the retrospective use of ethnonational categories that acquired their current meaning only in the nineteenth century is anachronistic in any event.

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manian neighbor’s child called a Hungarian neighbor’s child a bozgor, an ethnic slur. Balázs admonished the child, making it clear that while the remark had not been addressed to him, he resented it himself as a Hungarian. “You call him that, you call me that, too.” In a subsequent quarrel, with no ethnic content, the father of the Romanian child complained that the Hungarian child had called his son a “fool.” Balázs intervened again, invoking the previous bozgor incident, thus ethnicizing the current conflict. “And then I got really mad. ‘So your kid can call the other kid bozgor but he cannot be called a fool?’ I say. ‘Do you know what that means, bozgor?’ ‘No.’ ‘It means “without a country.” And you should know I’m not in any way more countryless than you are! Here I am not without a country! [ . . . ] I’d better not hear your kid say this ever again, because if he calls anyone else bozgor, he calls me bozgor.’ I haven’t talked to him since.”

Avoidance One way ethnicity can generate disagreement, we have seen, is through the deployment of conflicting “Hungarian” and “Romanian” perspectives on “sensitive” political issues such as the history and status of Transylvania or the demands and aspirations of the DAHR (or of “the Hungarians”). Of course not all Hungarians hold the “Hungarian” view, and not all Romanians the “Romanian” view. And there is not in fact a single “Hungarian” and a single “Romanian” view on such issues but a wide range of views, among which there is considerable scope for disagreement. Yet the fact that there are identifiable “Hungarian” and “Romanian” views on certain subjects, and that these can generate disagreement, is well known to Clujeni. As a result, these subjects are considered “sensitive,” and they are generally avoided in mixed settings. Yet the very act of avoidance can, paradoxically, make ethnicity experientially relevant. The self-conscious avoidance of ethnically or nationally sensitive issues implies an identification of co-participants in ethnic terms. Interactions between spouses and partners, classmates and colleagues, friends and neighbors can thus become experientially interethnic when such sensitive issues are broached—or when they are selfconsciously avoided.12 12 When avoidance is a matter of unselfconscious habit, it does not make ethnicity experientially relevant in the same way; but habitual avoidance can still help to reproduce ethnicity by reproducing ethnically conditioned silences.

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Many mixed couples report avoiding potentially sensitive political or national questions.13 Among friends, too, avoidance is characteristic. This is how a young Romanian truck driver described his relationship with a Hungarian friend: “I never had any conversations like, ‘hey, politics,’ or anything. I knew he was Hungarian and he’d vote for his party because they represented him best and I’d vote for whoever I wanted to. So we never discussed things like that. We’d talk about cars, about all sorts of different things, ‘hey, check out that chick!,’ and things like that.” In mixed workplaces, avoidance is often a self-consciously held norm, though as Gyuszi suggested above, avoidance is more characteristic of offices, while ethnicized joking and (less frequently) argument are more characteristic of factories (and of male working-class sociability). After describing the good relations with her Romanian colleagues at the clinic, for example, Mari added, unsolicited, “We don’t talk about the nationality problem. That’s taboo.” Yet sensitive matters do sometimes come up. They may slip out unintentionally; they may “leak” or “filter” in, for example from a radio or television broadcast; or they may be posed as a challenge or opening argumentative gambit. This may lead to an argument (or a discussion); but it may lead to a secondary kind of avoidance, when a sensitive subject is broached, but is not taken up or pursued. A thirtyish Romanian worker recounted an example in a group discussion. When his Hungarian neighbor claimed that Hungarians (but not Romanians) had been in Transylvania for a thousand years, he recalled, “I thought my blood pressure would go through the roof and I got up and left. [ . . . ] I didn’t want to upset him because he’s much older than me, but. . . .” We have suggested throughout Part Two that Clujeni become Hungarian and Romanian at particular times and places in ways that render these categorical descriptions not simply correct (as would be true of many other descriptions as well) but operative and interactionally relevant for participants themselves. Avoidance of ethnically and nationally sensitive issues sometimes makes Clujeni Hungarian and Romanian in this way, for it is oriented to participants’ ethnic identities (and to the standardized perspectives and stances conventionally associated with those identities). A Hungarian law student explained why she did not discuss the issue of the possible establishment of a Hungarian-language university in Cluj with her Romanian classmates. “I’m not even really 13 Others, however, reported that they did talk about politics, because their views—on Funar, for example, or on nationalist politics generally—were aligned. On practices of mixed couples in Cluj, see Grancea, “Romanian-Hungarian Intermarriage Practices”; Gaborean, “Strategii identitare cotidiene de conviet¸uire,” reports similar practices among mixed couples in Taˆrgu-Mures¸. On the avoidance of ethnicity in intermarriage between Mizrachi women and Ashkenazi men in Israel, see Benjamin and Barash, “ ‘He Thought I Would be Like My Mother,’ ” who see asymmetrical ethnic and gender differences combining to produce a “silencing” of ethnicity.

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curious about their opinion. [ . . . ] My feeling is they don’t see the situation realistically, they’re biased, and of course I don’t want to argue with them. And since it’s not possible to change their minds, I don’t usually talk to them about it.” The student avoided this contentious political issue, but in a manner that ascribed standardized “Romanian” views to her (nominally) Romanian classmates, in effect making them Romanian, in an interactionally relevant sense, for herself. Avoiding politicized ethnicity is thus a way of interactionally—if not discursively—accomplishing, even reinforcing, ethnicity.

Joking and Teasing Like avoidance, joking is often oriented to the potential that “sensitive” topics have for producing disagreement.14 Instead of being avoided, the sensitive matter is directly engaged, but in a manner that can defuse it, prevent tensions from building, and sustain amicable interaction in situations where avoidance might be awkward or impossible. In some workplaces, for example, workers cannot avoid hearing the news on the radio. “And then there’s the wretched loudspeaker,” commented Gábor, a Hungarian worker in his sixties, in an interview conducted in the mid1990s during a period of considerable political tension. “At ten o’clock, precisely when we sit down to eat, the news comes on. And if there’s something about the DAHR or the PRNU [a Romanian extreme nationalist party], it gets so quiet that you can hear the buzzing of a fly.” In situations like this, joking can counter both the awkwardness of not talking about the sensitive matter and the potential disagreement or conflict that might result from engaging it in a serious manner. At the time of the controversial excavations in the main square, Gábor recalled, “My Romanian colleagues asked me, in a joking way, if I would be going out at night to guard the statue [of Matthias Corvinus].” Gábor responded in kind, showing he understood this to be a joke, though not one he found amusing: “ ‘Yeah right, I have nothing better to do tonight,’ I say, ‘so I’ll just go stand there.’ ” Because of the joking frame, Gábor was obliged to play along, though he did so in a perfunctory, half-hearted manner.15 As this example suggests, joking sometimes 14 We limit our attention here to ethnicized joking or teasing in interethnic encounters; we do not address the telling of ethnic jokes in intraethnic settings. On the latter, see from a large literature Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World, and idem, The Mirth of Nations (the latter developing a critique of the widespread idea that ethnic jokes arise or reflect prejudice, hostility, or displaced aggression). 15 As Radcliffe-Brown observed, joking can impose certain obligations on those who are the audience, or objects, of the joking; one can be obliged not to take offense (“On Joking Relationships,” 174).

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has an edge to it; it can shade over into teasing, taunting, ritualized insults, or other more or less sublimated forms of conflict or aggression. Joking and teasing can also, of course, as in this example, embody and express differences of power and status, personal and political. Ethnicized joking is found not only in delicate situations. Some people routinely address each other using ethnic categories in a joking way. One Hungarian factory worker reported that he and his Romanian colleagues would sometimes greet each other with “Hey, Hungarian!” and “Hey, Romanian!” This good-natured invocation of ethnic categories served not to establish an ethnic frame for the interaction but to neutralize the potentially divisive implications of such a frame. A Romanian biology student described his interactions with Hungarian friends in the dorm in similar terms: “We joke from time to time, but no one has had a problem with that. [ . . . ] For example, we might pretend to be chauvinists. But they know we’re not serious, we know we’re not serious, there’s really no problem. [ . . . ] We’d say stuff, jokes like ‘just you wait, we’ll kick you out of the country!’ ” Sometimes joking marks a certain level of intimacy; it indicates that people know each other well enough to joke, perhaps well enough to use otherwise pejorative categories in a joking way. A middle-aged man whose father was Romanian and mother Hungarian reported that he always identified himself as Romanian. “Only my [Romanian] wife tells me ‘you’re a bozgor,’ a ‘stinking bozgor!’ When I do something wrong I’m always a stinking bozgor [laughs]. ‘You, with your bozgor mind, only you can come up with something like this.’ ” What is in other contexts an ethnic slur used to disparage Hungarians is here transformed into an affectionate nickname. A group of Romanian women factory workers in their forties described being able to joke easily with their long-standing Hungarian colleagues. “We laugh, we joke, we tease each other. [ . . . ] We’re old co-workers, we’ve worked together for twenty years, and this is how we’ve been joking from the very beginning.” They could not joke in the same way, however, with Hungarians from other workshops or shifts: “No, with the other ones you can’t joke the way we do with ours [our Hungarian coworkers]. You should see them, how they frown all of a sudden, at a joke, because they often come and work in our shift, and we joke with ours [our Hungarians], and they joke with us, because we’ve been co-workers for years, but the others, they just stand there and frown.” Joking, like avoidance, is a collaborative practice. A joking remark needs to be recognized and accepted as such if it is to succeed interactionally. If joking and teasing are not perceived or treated as such, they cannot serve to defuse or deflate a sensitive matter. Gábor, who reluctantly participated in the joking exchange with a Romanian co-worker about defend-

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ing the statue of Matthias Corvinus, recalled another occasion when he refused to play along. He had been asked whether he had voted for Funar in the first postcommunist mayoral election in 1992. He understood that this was “of course a teasing, joking” question, but he did not respond in kind: “I told him, ‘No, but you’ll see what he’ll do to our town.’ ” When remarks that are intended as jokes are not recognized as such, they may give offense. Rodica, who worked at a toy and ornaments factory, described such an incident at her workplace. When a Hungarian school group visited the factory, one of the children—whose mother worked at the factory—asked if the staff could make him a few Christmas tree ornaments. A Romanian worker offered him an ornament as a gift “from Funar,” but the child winced and said no. Rodica—who had prefaced her story by commenting unfavorably on the fact that the children had been speaking Hungarian, not Romanian—interpreted the child’s reaction as impolite. But Raul (a worker in a different factory) disagreed, observing that offering the child a present on behalf of the mayor had been inappropriate. Rodica responded, defensively, that this had been intended as a joke; but the other participants in the discussion did not see this as a legitimate joke. As Raul put it, closing the exchange, “Too bad [the child] didn’t tell her to stick it up somewhere.” The “gift” may have been intended as a joke, but joking requires collaboration to succeed, and here the collaboration was refused.

Choices Disagreement and conflict, avoidance, and joking and teasing are ways in which any nominally mixed relationship—between neighbors, schoolmates, workplace colleagues, friends, in-laws, lovers, or spouses—can become experientially mixed. There is a further way in which nominally mixed marriages or partnerships can come to be experienced as mixed. This occurs when choices must be made between institutionally defined and ethnically marked alternatives. Such choices are occasionally faced in other nominally mixed relationships. In mixed families, where children are involved, choices between ethnically marked alternatives are regularly generated at certain junctures in the relationship. It is the existence of parallel Romanian and Hungarian institutions—especially churches and schools—that confronts mixed couples with such ethnically marked choices. These choices can be the object, before and after the fact, of disagreement and conflict, of avoidance, or of joking or teasing. Yet even when they are not ethnicized in these ways, the choices themselves cannot help but make ethnicity at least momentarily salient. Such structured choices begin with the wedding ceremony itself. Given

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the close association between ethnicity and religion, the great majority of ethnically mixed couples also belong (at least nominally) to different churches, and must decide in which church to hold the ceremony. (Almost all weddings are celebrated in churches, regardless of whether those marrying are religiously observant.) With the birth of a child, parents have to decide on a name, the religion of baptism, what language or languages to speak in the home, whether—and how—to celebrate religious and national holidays, and what school the child should attend.16 All of these involve choices between ethnically marked alternatives.17 Some choices are cast in an either/or format. Mixed couples must choose a school in which the language of instruction is either Romanian or Hungarian.18 In the preceding chapter, we observed that most Hungarians do not self-consciously “choose” a language of instruction for their children, but rather take it for granted that the children will attend Hungarian schools; a fortiori, Romanian families do not need to “choose” a Romanian-language school for their children. Mixed families, however, face a genuine choice.19 Precisely because this is (for most families) an either/or choice, and one that is understood to have enduring and widely ramifying consequences, not least for the child’s eventual identification as Romanian or Hungarian, the choice is often fraught with tension, and is sometimes the subject of conflict.20 Yet even when it does not provoke conflict, school choice provides an occasion for mixed marriages to be experienced as mixed. In other contexts, both ethnically marked variants can be chosen, either simultaneously or successively, while still other choices allow options 16 Other choices, too, can become ethnically marked in certain circumstances, though they are not ordinarily so. These include choices of holiday destinations, newspapers, television or radio programs, sports loyalties, home furnishings, and even food. 17 We are not suggesting that all intermarriage practices are the result of conscious decision making. And even deliberate decisions are not always carried out in a consistent manner. Couples who opt for a “one parent, one language” strategy of linguistic socialization may not consistently put this into practice. Similarly, carefully chosen and officially registered names may be replaced in everyday life with nicknames or diminutives. 18 Private English-language kindergartens are an exception, for those who can afford them. 19 Structural factors, of course, strongly influence this choice; as we observed in the preceding chapter, the majority of children from mixed families attend Romanian schools. 20 These conflicts were described in one Hungarian group discussion by a forty-something technician in a small Hungarian computer repair firm. The main conflicts were with his father-inlaw, “a terrible chauvinist, terrible,” but the issue strained relations with his wife as well. “When I got married, that’s when I realized who my father-in-law was and what he was all about, so my wife and I, we had an agreement like– just as if we had made a contract [ . . . ] we agreed on how many children, how long they’d go to a Hungarian school, after that to a Romanian school, and so on, we agreed on every last detail about how things were going to be [laughter from others]. But look, in every marriage there are problems. [ . . . ] Every year we had two or three weeks of arguments: ‘What, you’re gonna enroll him in a Hungarian school again?’ And then I used to come back with ‘Hey remember? Through eighth grade, and then he goes to a Romanian school.’ My wife finally got it, but my father-in-law didn’t.”

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that are neither Hungarian nor Romanian. In choosing “both /and” or “neither/nor” solutions, mixed couples often display a sense of reciprocity or fairness. Many mixed couples, for example, arrange for two wedding ceremonies, one in a “Romanian,” the other in a “Hungarian” church. Wedding parties can also be planned in a “both / and” spirit. One young couple who married in the mid-1990s recalled trying to “please everyone” by assuring that “everyone had a fair share” of music that they could identify with—“half an hour of csárdás [Hungarian folk music], half an hour of Romanian folk music. [ . . . ] Oldies for our parents’ generation, more up-to-date music for us.” Here the wedding party was understood as mixed in both ethnic and generational terms, and the planning displayed reciprocity with respect to both dimensions of difference. Naming children provides another occasion for fairness. Instead of identifiably Romanian or Hungarian names, many couples choose translatable names (with equivalents in both languages and often a shared diminutive) or “international” names (names that are neither Romanian nor Hungarian.) Reciprocity is possible even in either/or situations such as baptism or school choice. Dual baptisms (unlike wedding ceremonies) do not occur, but some couples arrange to distribute official religious affiliations across children. The baptism of the first child, for example, may depend on the sex of the child, a boy being baptized in the father’s religion, a girl in the mother’s. The second child is then baptized in the other religion, regardless of sex. And some couples mitigate the either/or logic of school choice by sending the child to a Hungarian elementary school, and then switching to Romanian in middle school or high school (the reverse is very uncommon). Language, too, can accommodate both/and practices. Both Romanian and Hungarian are spoken, in varying proportions, in most mixed families. 21 Speaking both languages is most often an unselfconscious practice, not a self-conscious choice. Yet there are moments of self-conscious choice in most mixed marriages. The birth of a child often prompts a discussion about who will speak what language or languages with the child. A common practice—about which there is often some discussion, decision, or arrangement—is for each parent to speak his or her mother tongue with the children. In other cases, where both parents speak Romanian with the children (sometimes so as to avoid a situation in which one spouse speaks a language not understood by the other), the children may learn Hungarian from the Hungarian grandparents; this may again be the object of discussion or of an “arrangement.” One couple, whose 21 Although both languages are spoken in most mixed families, structural incentives favor Romanian, just as they tend to channel the majority of children of mixed families into Romanian schools.

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jobs did not allow them much time with their ten-year-old son, made a point of sending him to spend weekends and vacations with his Hungarian grandparents so that he “would not forget his Hungarian.” (Grandparents often play a central role in bringing up children, especially when both parents work outside the home.) Mixed marriages come to be experienced as mixed at such moments of choice between ethnically marked alternatives. This happens even when couples seek to avoid choosing one ethnically marked alternative or the other through strategies of reciprocity or fairness. It is the orientation to the ethnically marked alternatives, and the awareness of them as ethnically marked, not the actual selection of such an alternative, that makes ethnicity interactionally relevant. Reciprocity in this sense is thus a way in which ethnicity becomes experientially relevant, not a way of transcending ethnicity.22

Conclusion When we speak of relationships or interactions as ethnically mixed, we can mean two very different things. We can mean that the people involved belong nominally to different ethnic categories; or we can mean that they experience the relationship or interaction as mixed. The literature has been concerned primarily with nominally mixed relationships and interactions; we have been concerned here with those that are experientially mixed. As a nominal phenomenon, “mixedness” is a continuous and stable property of a relationship or an interaction; as an experiential phenomenon, it is episodic and intermittent. In the nominal sense, an interaction or a relationship is mixed; in the experiential sense, it becomes mixed—in the sense that it comes to be experienced as mixed—at particular moments. We have focused here on the manner and modalities in which nominally mixed relationships come to be experienced as mixed. We have analyzed four ways in which ethnicity “happens” in the course of everyday interaction among friends, neighbors, colleagues, or spouses: through disagreement and conflict, avoidance, joking and teasing, and choice between institutionally defined (and ethnically marked) alternatives. We 22 Although mixed marriages are the primary context, they are not the only context for such ethnically framed reciprocity. The Easter holidays, for example, provide an occasion for neighbors and friends to experience their relationships as mixed. “Romanian” (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) and “Hungarian” (Catholic and Calvinist) Easters usually fall on different dates, and are associated with different traditional dishes and different styles of painted eggs. Although these differences are more marked in rural areas, Hungarian and Romanian neighbors and friends are aware of the differences, and sometimes exchange visits, traditional Easter dishes, and painted eggs.

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are not suggesting that ethnicity is relevant only at such moments, or only through such modalities. Even though nominally interethnic relationships are only episodically experienced as mixed, they are structured in a more continuous fashion by demographic, linguistic, and political asymmetries. Yet while those asymmetries provide the context for our analysis, they are not the focus of our analysis here. We have been concerned here with the experience of ethnicity in mixed relationships, not with the broad structural and political factors that provide templates for conflicts and disagreements, govern what topics are avoided (and what cannot be avoided), shape patterns of joking and teasing, and influence the outcomes of choices between institutionally structured and ethnically marked alternatives.

Chapter 11




MIGRATIONS

Like others throughout the region, Clujeni have enjoyed a vastly increased freedom of movement since the change of regime. They have worked abroad, traded across the border, visited friends and relatives abroad, and joined church and school excursions; some have attended foreign universities and traveled as tourists to previously inaccessible destinations. The new freedom of movement is part of a more general opening up of a previously closed world. The relentless daily exposure to international consumer modernity and transborder forms of popular culture through the media and through newly available (if not necessarily affordable) consumption goods has tended to weaken the cognitive and institutional frame of the nation-state. Migration works in the same direction; it involves thinking and acting in ways that erode the power of the nation-state as a “container” of social life. Yet in other ways, migration heightens awareness of ethnicity and nationness; it has nationalizing as well as denationalizing or transnationalizing consequences. It is these that we address in this chapter.

“AICI NU SE MAI POATE” After the draconian controls and tightly patrolled borders of the Ceaus¸escu era, the chance to travel and work abroad has been keenly appreciated. Yet the opening up has also meant an emptying out. With average monthly salaries around $100 and a disappointingly small supply of local jobs with Western firms, most Clujeni are deeply pessimistic about their prospects for finding a job in Cluj—or elsewhere in Transylvania—that would be adequate to support themselves, let alone a family. For many, getting out seems to be the most promising and sometimes the only way of getting ahead, or even of getting by. In a number of group discussions, migration came up immediately, without prompting, when the theme of the difficulties of getting by was introduced.1 Aici nu se mai poate—“There’s just no way of making it here any more”—is a common formulation. 1

See Appendix B, “A Note on Data.”

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As a result, migration has become experientially central in Cluj, woven into the fabric of daily lives in countless ways.2 Many Clujeni have themselves worked abroad; almost all have close friends or family members who have worked or are working or living abroad. Few Clujeni have not at least thought of doing so themselves. Stories of success abroad—even though they are often exaggerated, and even though they are countered by stories of failure, hardship, and humiliation—are powerfully resonant. A middle-aged accountant in a Romanian group discussion described hearing from her niece, who was working in France: “She calls me one night and says, ‘Aunt Marinela’—she went there with her husband— ‘Aunt Marinela, I’m making 400 marks a day.’3 A day? ‘A day.’ I don’t think she’s lying. ‘That’s what my husband and I make.’ When am I going to make 400. . . . I don’t make that much in a month, do I? And she makes that much in a day or two. [ . . . ] So they leave, they leave, young people are leaving.” Tangible signs of success—such as the fancy cars or photographs of foreign vacations that emigrants often bring with them when they return to town for a visit—reinforce and validate the stories.4 Newspapers, television, mass emailings, posters, and street-spanning banners advertise opportunities for work abroad; companies recruit workers for specific positions; and firms have sprung up that claim to assist—but in some cases simply prey on—those seeking jobs abroad.5 Prospective migrants exchange tidbits of information, of varying reliability, about intermediary firms, visa regulations, job opportunities, contact people, and transportation and lodging possibilities. Migration has become a major topos in the media, all the more so after the 2002 census results revealed a 5 percent decline in the country’s population during the preceding decade.6 Who has gone where, and with what results, is a recurrent subject of everyday conversation. 2 The experience of Clujeni is similar to that of many others throughout Eastern Europe. On post-1989 migration patterns in the region, see for example Fassmann and Münz, eds., OstWest-Wanderung in Europa; Favell and Hansen, “Markets against Politics”; Okólski, “Migration Patterns in Central and Eastern Europe”; Wallace, “Opening and Closing Borders.” On migration to East Central European countries from points further east, see Wallace and Stola, eds., Patterns of Migration in Central Europe. 3 During the period of our research, before the introduction of the euro, Clujeni often reckoned money in marks or dollars. 4 On the social dynamics that often lead to the ostentatious display of success by returning migrants, see Potot, “Mobilités en Europe,” 102. 5 See plates 22a–c. 6 The fact that seven Romanian citizens were killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1996, and that sixteen Romanians were among the 190 killed in the subway attacks in Madrid in March 2004, served to symbolize, and dramatize, the magnitude of the emigration. On post1989 migration from Romania, see Sandu, “Migrat¸ia circulatorie ca strategie de viat¸a˘”; Potot, “Les migrants transnationaux”; idem, “Mobilités en Europe”; La˘za˘roiu, “Romania”; Diminescu et al, “Les circulations migratoires roumaines”; Diminescu, ed., Visibles mais peu nombreux; Radu, “Human Capital Content”; Ohliger, “Von der ethnischen zur ‘illegalen’ Migration”; and Horváth, “A 2002-es romániai népszámlálás.”

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The sense that many—too many—are leaving is pervasive. Sometimes this is expressed with black humor, as in the following discussion among Romanian workers in their late thirties: Smaranda: Visas are the big problem—otherwise I think half the country would be gone. Sorin: Not half, more like three quarters. [laughter] [...] Doru: [more seriously] If we won’t need visas any more, I’ll bet about 30 percent will leave—workers, those who want to work.7 Those who want to steal, they’ll do just fine here. In a group of Romanian university graduates in their late twenties and early thirties, one participant relayed a friend’s comment: “You’re all leaving now, and I’m staying behind to turn out the lights, y’know?” In another group, a young unemployed Romanian woman joked, “If somebody says they’ll give me citizenship in Africa, and that I have to renounce my [Romanian citizenship], I’d accept.” The theme of a large-scale exodus recurred in more sober appraisals as well. “Almost all [of my former classmates] have left for Hungary,” a middle-aged Hungarian worker in a machine tool factory lamented, “very few of us stayed here.” “More than half my classmates have left” was a common refrain. As a Romanian locksmith in his early forties put it, “All the young people who’ve graduated and studied hard in this country, you have to realize, they’ve all left.” The readiness to leave, given a suitable opportunity elsewhere, is taken as axiomatic by many young Clujeni. As Claudiu put it, “Stop anyone on the street and ask, ‘Look, you have the right to go to France. [ . . . ] You can leave tomorrow. Are you going or not?’ I’m telling you they’re going.” Although comments about “everybody” leaving are obviously grossly exaggerated, they do point to the centrality of migration in the ways Clujeni think and talk about their social world. The motif of depletion is sometimes ethnicized or linked to a nationalist stance. This is most common in Hungarian discussions, especially in the Hungarian media, but also occasionally in everyday conversation.8 As Karcsi put it, “Lots of people have left, and it’s wrong, it’s just not right to leave. [ . . . ] And so we’re fewer and fewer here. [ . . . ] Mostly 7 This discussion occurred in December 2000, a year before visa restrictions for Romanians were in fact lifted by EU countries. 8 The nationalist note is sounded, albeit less frequently, in Romanian discussions as well, again most commonly in the media, notably after the 2002 census results were announced, but also occasionally in everyday conversation. The one occasion on which Lucian (whose obliviousness to ethnicity we emphasized in chapter 5) described himself as a “nationalist,” for example, was when he was lamenting the fact that so many of the best and brightest young people were leaving the country.

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young people have left . . . Older people too, but tons of young people.” For Karcsi, the “we” here is clearly an ethnic “we”; it is Hungarians who are “fewer and fewer.” But Hungarian references to large-scale outmigration are not consistently ethnicized. When Hungarians, referring to their high school classmates, observe that there are “few of us left,” the frame of reference is not explicitly ethnic (even though all of the classmates in question are in fact Hungarian); it is personal and institutional, referring to one’s circle of school friends, not to the wider, more abstract “Hungarian community.” Most Clujeni continue to think of migration as a temporary expedient, though some are set on emigrating, favored destinations being the United States (with its visa lottery), Canada (with its point system favoring skills and language knowledge), and Hungary (for Hungarians). A common strategy, as in other settings, is to work for a few months, or sometimes for a year or two, and then return. The intention is often to save up enough money to start one’s own business, or to purchase a flat, or a car, or simply to provide a modest financial cushion. Of course, some who go abroad intending to return end up settling abroad.9 For the fortunate few, such as those with top-notch programming skills, working abroad can mean a well-paying, above-board, stable job in Western Europe or North America. Many computer science students, like Lucian and Claudiu, are confident they can find such jobs. For the majority, who are likely to work in construction, in hotels and restaurants, as caretakers, or as seasonal farmworkers, conditions are less favorable. Many work illegally, or in precarious situations, and are vulnerable to arbitrary and exploitative employers. Like labor migrants worldwide, the work they do is often dirty, dangerous, or demeaning. Migration is not a step taken lightly. Most people are well aware of the difficulties and hardships. Some invoke these factors to justify their staying put; but the very fact that staying put sometimes requires justification testifies eloquently to the experiential centrality of migration. Consider the following extended excerpt from a Romanian group discussion: Grigore: [male, carpenter, thirty-five]: Hungary needs people to work [ . . . ] no problem there. But if I were to just get on a train and go to Hungary to look for work, that wouldn’t be . . . I might find work, or I might not. The next day I’m back? Or what? Stay a week, look for work for another two weeks or what? No matter how you look at it, you’ve got to have . . . Claudia: [waitress, thirty-three] Connections. 9 On the processes through which sojourners gradually come to understand themselves as settlers, see Piore, Birds of Passage.

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Grigore: A network, you need //a firm Claudia: //If you don’t speak the language, you’re not going to get by. Grigore: and we know how these firms are here. Lidia: [seamstress, thirty-five] Ghost firms. Marinela: [female, accountant, forty-two] I would go tomorrow, tomorrow, to get a piece of the action there, you can get there in a few hours, you go, you come back. Grigore: But you come back once every couple of weeks if you want, or you come every week, //every weekend. You come back Saturday, Marinela: //Seriously, I’d go tomorrow to work. Grigore: Sunday you go back, it’s two, two and a half hours [from Cluj to the Hungarian border]. [...] Lidia: I could go, too, but what about my family? That’s the problem. Adina: [female, unemployed, thirty-seven] If you want to go to work, you have to leave them. Lidia: //Sure, but who am I going to leave them with? Claudia: //Money’s not so important; family, that’s more important. Adina: I know //someone— Lidia: //Money’s not so important, not even in Hungary, so that you can say it’s worth leaving your family. Adina: I know someone who left his three-year-old kid [ . . . ] went to Italy, he stayed a //year and two months. Lidia: //Okay, but we’re talking about Hungary. Adina: No, I’m talking about Italy. [ . . . ] This guy goes, stays a year and two months, and says [to his family] “You’ll be fine, I’ve got no choice but to . . .” Okay, but he had a place to leave his daughter, with his in-laws. [...] Lidia: Okay, like that, I’d leave my kids, too. [...] Marinela: Okay, like that, sure, I have in-laws, too, and I’d leave my kids with them to raise if they were three years old, fine, before they start going to school [ . . . ] Lidia: But when they’re thirteen or fourteen, who’s going to take care of them? Who are you going to leave them with? Adina: When they’re thirteen or fourteen, just when you should be seeing to their future, guiding them //toward . . . Lidia: //If you lose control of them now, you’ve lost them forever. Marinela: Exactly.

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As this discussion suggests, the stories people tell about migration are not simply about economic success and failure. The difficulties and hardships migrants face are moral and psychological as well as material; they engage identities as well as interests. In the succeeding sections, we consider some of those moral and psychological difficulties and hardships, focusing on the ways in which national or ethnic self-understandings are challenged, and in some cases transformed, by the experience of international migration.10

Stigmatized Citizenship In Cluj, as elsewhere in Romania, legal citizenship is generally taken for granted. In a setting with very few long-term resident foreigners, almost everyone is a Romanian citizen, and citizenship is therefore seldom a relevant identity. Citizenship comes to matter chiefly in connection with migration or travel abroad. When Clujeni cross international frontiers, they become Romanians, defined by their citizenship. But Romanians in what sense? As we observed in chapter 7, the category “Romanian” can be understood in various ways. In some contexts, it has a clearly ethnocultural meaning: Romanian and not Hungarian. This is the way the category is used and understood by most Hungarians; in this understanding, being a Romanian citizen does not make one a “Romanian.”11 For (ethnocultural) Romanians in Cluj, most of the time, “Romanian” does not have this (or any other) contrastive meaning; it is a taken-for-granted identity in which language, citizenship, and country are conflated. When crossing borders into Western or Northern Europe, “Romanian” does acquire a sharp contrastive meaning. But the relevant contrast is not with Hungarians; it is with Europeans who possess “good” citizenships. In this context, Romanians have a “bad,” decidedly stigmatized citizenship—a “spoiled” identity, in Goffman’s terms.12 For many, the stigmatization begins at the border itself (or even before: applying for a visa is often described as a humiliating experience). International travel makes citizenship visible, salient, indeed inescapable. One cannot avoid being identified by citizenship at the border. Borders demand passports; passports convey citizenship; and citizenship activates commonsense, stereotypical knowledge about people from 10 For a study of the ways in which migration has reshaped national self-understandings in another context, see Morawska, “National Identities of Polish (Im)migrants in Berlin.” 11 For an example, see chapter 7, p. 214. 12 See Goffman, Stigma. For broader historical reflections on stigmatized identity in the Romanian case, see Antohi, “Romania and the Balkans,” and idem, “Cioran s¸i stigmatul romaˆnesc.” For an historical perspective on the exclusion of Romania from Europe, characterizing the

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Romania.13 The Romanian passport, in the experience of many Romanians, is a badge of dishonor; it marks them as undesirables, even potential criminals. A municipal employee in his mid-twenties recalled his first trip to Western Europe: Silviu: Oh my God, the first time I went to Italy, I was in a bus full of Romanians, we crossed the border into Hungary, and we had to wait about four hours on the border, four hours, something like that. They checked us for everything from A to Z, they brought out the big guard dogs, they sniffed all of us. [laughter] Ileana: Be glad they didn’t bite you! Silviu: I don’t think they were trained to bite . . . Or maybe if they knew we were Romanians. [laughter] Silviu: Then we got to the former Yugoslavia, we went through without any problems, but at the Italian border, they made all of us get out of the car [laughter], and I’m telling you, the Hungarians had dogs, but the Italians, they looked at everything, everything, everything we had. [laughter] And they didn’t want to let us continue because one of my colleagues had some stomach problem and he had some medicine with him [laughter], and we had to wait for the drug agents to come. They searched the women’s luggage thoroughly, too, down to the most intimate things they carried to see if they were hiding something. [laughter] This story was accompanied by a chorus of knowing laughter from the others in the group—not because the story was particularly funny, but because it evoked a common experience. Or consider the following excerpt from a Romanian group discussion, in which several young men discuss their experiences abroad: S¸tefan: [unskilled worker] I stopped telling people I was from Romania. They [his new acquaintances] talked to me in English, and if they asked me [where he was from], I invented a country right away, Germany, Italy, whatever they wanted. [...]

post-1989 exclusion from Central Europe as a form of “supplementary marginalization,” see idem, “Romaˆnii în anii ’90,” 293–97. On symbolic geography more generally, as it pertains to Eastern Europe, see Gal, “Bartók’s Funeral”; Bakic´-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’ ”; Bakic´-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms”; L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; and Antohi, “Habits of the Mind.” 13 Löfgren, “Crossing Borders,” refers to the emergence of a new type of identity in connection with border-crossing: a passport-identity.

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Alin: [student] Anything but Romania. [ . . . ] They look down on you if you tell them you’re Romanian, everyone, it doesn’t matter if they’re Hungarian, German . . . [...] S¸tefan: I got to know [ . . . ] a couple of, I don’t know what they were, I can’t remember, Czechs, I think, and the first thing they asked when I told them I was from Romania was, “Do they beat you up there at night, is it true they kill you?” And like the Romanian smartass I am, I told them that’s the way it was in Romania, in Transylvania it wasn’t like that. By the end I wasn’t even saying I was from Romania, only if I was asked. [...] Liviu: [worker] And just last time we told those guys we met, we told them that we’re from where? From Yugoslavia or something like that? Marcel: [student] From the Czech Republic. [...] Alin: No, it sucks when the person next to you, they smile at first, all friendly, and then you tell them you’re Romanian and they say “Uhuh,” and you //have this . . . Liviu: //You can see they’re uncomfortable [with it] S¸tefan: They think to themselves, “Hey, what if these guys rob us now, what if they beat the crap out of us?” That’s how //they see us. Alin: //Or at least that’s what we think that they think about us, you never know. Marcel: No, but you can tell it from their reaction right after you tell them you’re Romanian. S¸tefan: They sit there and think to themselves “Ah . . . Hm.” Liviu: “We’d better check our pockets!” Marcel: “Yeah, these are the guys //with the swans.” S¸tefan: //They put their hands on their pockets and then ask you about this and that, what the weather’s like in Romania. Liviu: Whether we eat swans. [chuckles] The seemingly odd closing comment in this extract—“whether we eat swans”—refers to an anecdote so widely circulated as to have become part of popular folklore in postcommunist Romania. In the early 1990s, it was said, several Romanian Gypsies had been arrested in Vienna for eating a swan they had captured and roasted over an open fire in a city

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park. This anecdote was used to account for the difficulties Romanians faced when traveling abroad. “Swan-eating” indexed a wide range of “uncivilized” behavior allegedly practiced by Romanian Gypsies, behavior that came to be associated with Romanians in general. All Romanians, on this view, suffered the consequences of the behavior of a small minority of Romanian citizens—a minority, moreover, from which the majority vehemently dissociated itself. As we observed above, “Gypsy” (t¸igan, cigány) is a deeply stigmatized category in Cluj (as it is elsewhere in Romania, and throughout Europe). Romanians and Hungarians distinguish themselves much more sharply from Gypsies than from one another; we have heard them demonstrate their tolerance toward one another by contrasting this with their categorical aversion to Gypsies. Gypsies are not accorded the dignity of membership in the same category set: while Hungarians and Romanians recognize each other as members of ethnocultural nationalities, most see Gypsies as members of a subordinate caste.14 These powerfully resonant categorical distinctions collapse when one crosses an international frontier. What they collapse into is not a neutral, abstract, “civic” category, but what might be called an “ethnocivic” category: while the name and scope of the category are defined by citizenship, its connotations, and the stereotypical knowledge about category members they convey, are highly ethnicized. The stigmatization of Gypsies does not disappear; it is extended to the entire category. Gypsies are assimilated to Romanians, and Romanians to Gypsies.15 Given the prevailing anti-Gypsy sentiment, it is not surprising that this assimilation, and the transfer of stigma it effects, are resented. The theme came up spontaneously in several group discussions, as in the following exchange between a thirtyish unskilled worker and his somewhat older colleague, a skilled worker: Emil: Goddamn Gypsies with their illegal businesses, with all sorts of criminal records. [ . . . ] They went out and devastated everything wherever they went. So what you get now is 14 On category sets, see chapter 7, p. 213. On Roma as a stigmatized category in postsocialist East Central Europe, see Kligman, “On the Social Construction of ‘Otherness.’ ” For survey data on social distance and stereotypes in Transylvania, see Culic, Horváth, and Rat¸, “The Model of Romanian Interethnic Relations,” 259–64; Csepeli, Örkény, and Székelyi, Grappling with National Identity, 45. For a succinct statement contrasting the horizontal organization (Nebeneinander) of ethnicity with the vertical organization (Übereinander) of caste, see M. Weber, Economy and Society, 934 (cf. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 685); see also Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 21ff., on ranked and unranked systems of ethnic relations. 15 This transfer of stigma from a subcategory to a broader category is similar to a process we described in chapter 7, pp. 233–34, through which Transylvanian Romanians assimilate “southerners” to Gypsies.

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“Passport! Romanian.” Ech! Romanian, end of story, trouble, good-bye. Elena: When they see them, they don’t want them anymore, because they’re Romanian [ . . . ] and so we’re all lumped together. Silviu, the municipal employee quoted above, struck a similar note in another group discussion: “When we left [the country], we paid the price for how others behaved before us, the ones that left right after the revolution and did what they did. They screwed things up for the rest of us. So now it doesn’t matter anymore what you do, you can be the best of the best, but you’re still considered Romanian, and whether you like it or not, you’re compared to the Gypsies. If you’re Romanian, you’re a Gypsy.” In a third group, a Romanian engineer in her thirties recounted her experience in Ireland: They’re very reserved. When they hear about Romania, for one thing, we’re in the East, and then “Romanian” means “Gypsy,” to them “Romanian” means we all just climbed down from trees, we don’t know anything. They were very impressed with me: “But you have very good skills”16 [another participant laughs]. “But you— are you really an engineer?” And I said, “postgraduated engineer.” I don’t even know if I said it right [laughter], but I wanted him to know I was more than he thought. And we have universities, too, and we go to school, even more than they do. Such stereotypical accounts, part of collectively constructed common sense, can contribute to producing the experiences they purport to describe. The knowledge of bearing a stigmatized citizenship can inform one’s expectations and one’s interpretations of ambiguous behavior.17 Delia, a young professional, reported that a Parisian shopkeeper had kept a close eye on her and her friends after learning they were from Romania. Perhaps the shopkeeper actually did so; but it is also possible that Delia’s commonsense knowledge of how Romanians are viewed abroad led her to impute such views to the shop owner, and to construe his conduct in a way that confirmed her own commonsense knowledge. As our field research was drawing to a close, it was announced that Romanian citizens would no longer require visas after January 1, 2002, for travel to the Schengen area (comprising most EU countries). The

16 17

The italicized phrases in this excerpt were in English in the original. See Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition,” 37–44.

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news was greeted with enthusiasm by many Clujeni, who followed news bearing on migration with an eagerness that contrasted sharply with their blasé attitude toward most other political news. Symbolically, the lifting of restrictions marked inclusion in Europe. But others doubted that this change in legal status would change their experience abroad. The stigma attached to particular citizenships, like that attached to other markers, is grounded ultimately in commonsense knowledge and popular perceptions, not in law. Legal restrictions are stigmatizing in their own right, but their removal may do little to reshape commonsense beliefs. As Goffman brilliantly showed, there are numerous strategies for the management of “spoiled identities”; but such identities cannot be easily repaired.

The Ambivalent Homeland The experience of bearing a stigmatized citizenship when traveling abroad is common to Romanian and Hungarian Clujeni. But when Hungarians travel to Hungary, and especially when they work there as labor migrants, as many do, they confront additional, deeply fraught issues of recognition and identification. As a relatively prosperous, proximate, and accessible country, Hungary has been a popular destination for travelers, cross-border traders, labor migrants, and resettlers from Transylvania since the change of regime, indeed even in the last few years before the change of regime.18 It has been most attractive, of course, to Transylvanian Hungarians: besides knowing the language, they generally have better contacts in Hungary than Transylvanian Romanians (though significant numbers of Romanians, too, have worked and even resettled in Hungary). In economic terms, to be sure, Hungary is not the most favored destination; while wages are significantly higher than in Romania, they remain far lower than in Western Europe. Given the opportunity to work in Northern or Western Europe, many Transylvanian Hungarians, like Romanians, would seize it. But few have that opportunity. And since many do have good contacts in Hungary, many settle for working there. 18 There was a surge in migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary in the last few years of the Ceaus¸escu regime. Some emigrated officially; others traveled to Hungary as tourists and did not return; still others crossed the border clandestinely. Beginning in 1988, Hungary allowed Transylvanian Hungarians and other Romanian citizens to stay in Hungary, treating them, in effect, as refugees (see Kürti, “Transylvania,” 32; Tóth, Haza csak egy van, chapter 5). Largescale temporary labor migration, however, began only after the change of regime.

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When Transylvanian Hungarians work in Hungary, they bring with them certain expectations, shaped by the long history linking Transylvania and Hungary, and by cultural idioms and political rhetoric on both sides of the border. Most migration (and foreign travel) involves movement from one’s own country to a foreign land. Yet when Transylvanian Hungarians come to Hungary, they are moving from a country that is only ambiguously “their own” to one that is, in some respects, also their own.19 Most Transylvanian Hungarians feel a strong connection with Hungary, their anyaország, or mother country. This sense of affinity is part of their self-understanding as “Hungarian.” As we have noted, Hungarianness is not simply a local ethnicity; it is a state-transcending cultural “nationality.” The central symbols of that cultural nationality are found in Hungary, and especially in Budapest. Many Transylvanian Hungarians see Budapest as “their” capital (in a cultural sense); they feel an affinity and affection for Budapest that they do not feel for Bucharest. This is expressed in many small ways. Homes are often decorated with photographs of cultural, artistic, or historical monuments in Budapest (or elsewhere in Hungary). Family trips to visit the major cultural sights of Hungary are an important ritual of ethnonational identification. In international sporting competitions, most Transylvanian Hungarians regard the national team of Hungary as “their” team. Although the identification with Hungary is primarily cultural, it has a political dimension as well. The national anthem of Hungary is seen by most Transylvanian Hungarians as their anthem as well, the national holidays celebrated in Hungary as their national holidays, the red-whitegreen flag of Hungary as their flag.20 Many would like to have dual 19 On the migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary, see Csata and Tamás, “Migrációs potenciál Erdélyben”; Horváth, “Migrációs hajlandóság”; idem, “Az erdélyi magyarság vándormozgalmi vesztesége”; Hárs et al, “Hungary”; Tóth and Tünde, “A magyar lakosság”; Fox, “National Identities on the Move”; and Örkény, ed., Menni vagy maradni. The migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary is part of a broader class of “migrations of ethnic affinity” involving migration to a country that is construed in some way as an ethnonational “homeland.” The migrations of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and successor states to Germany in the late 1980s and 1990s is another important instance, as is the migration of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews to Israel. On the broader class of cases, see Brubaker, “Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing”; on state policies that give special preference to such migrants, Joppke, Selecting by Origin; on the German and Israeli cases, Levy and Weiss, eds., Challenging Ethnic Citizenship. 20 A Hungarian who grew up in Cluj in the late 1970s, a period of intensified Romanian nationalism, recalled drawing a picture of the red, yellow, and blue Romanian flag, as she had learned to do at school (even in the Hungarian school she attended, students were intensively exposed to Romanian nationalist pedagogy). “This is not our flag,” observed her grandfather, an old-style Hungarian nationalist, on seeing the picture; he went on to explain that “our” flag was the red, white, and green Hungarian flag. The transborder identification with national holidays is suggested by the fact that many Transylvanian Hungarians travel to Budapest to participate in the celebration of St. Stephen’s Day on August 20.

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Hungarian and Romanian citizenship;21 they feel that their mother country has some kind of special responsibility for them.22 Understanding themselves as part of a transborder Hungarian nation, Transylvanian Hungarians bring with them to Hungary a distinctive set of expectations. They know of course that Hungary is in many respects a “foreign” country. As migrant laborers, they certainly do not expect to feel entirely “at home”; they are aware of differences not only in wages but in material civilization, life style, and mentality. Yet in traveling to Hungary, they understand themselves as traveling to a country that, in some sense, belongs to them, and to which they, in turn, belong. Transylvanian Hungarians thus come to Hungary as Hungarians, and not simply as Romanian citizens, as skilled or unskilled workers, as men or women. Hungarianness is a taken-for-granted identity for them. Yet that identity is called into question in Hungary. Instead of being at least tacitly recognized and accepted as Hungarian, many migrants find themselves treated as Romanian. This happens so often that a special word— lerománozás—has come into use among Transylvanian Hungarians to designate the experience of being treated in a derogatory fashion as a Romanian. Consider the following excerpt from a group discussion of young, university-educated Hungarians: Attila: Everybody considers you //as a Romanian Zsófi: //Romanian. Oláh, //excuse me, Oláh.23 Attila: //and “where did this stinking Romanian come from?” [ . . . ] That’s the way they treat you a lot of times, that you live on the street, and I don’t know, you steal, and they come up with all this stuff about you. Márta: That’s right. Zsófi: [ . . . ] It was as if you were Afghan or something. [ . . . ] It didn’t matter that you were Hungarian, I mean in terms of your 21 A proposal to offer dual citizenship with no residence requirement to transborder Hungarians, supported by the DAHR, became the focus of a contentious (and narrowly defeated) referendum campaign in Hungary in 2004. See Kovács, “The Politics of Non-resident Dual Citizenship”; Kántor and Majtényi, “A ‘ketto´´s állampolgárság’ ”; and, for documentation about the debate, http://www.kettosallampolgarsag.mtaki.hu/. On analogous debates in Romania over provisions that permit nonresident dual citizenship for most citizens of Moldova and some citizens of Ukraine, see Iordachi, “Dual Citizenship and Policies Toward Kin Minorities.” 22 The identification has come from the other side of the border as well. Transylvanian and other transborder Hungarians—a taboo subject during the early phase of communist rule in Hungary—were “rediscovered” in the 1970s and 1980s. See chapter 2, pp. 87–88, and, for the postcommunist period, culminating in the Status Law codifying the status and rights of transborder coethnics, chapter 4, pp. 125–26, and chapter 12, pp. 350–51. 23 Oláh is a Hungarian ethnic slur used to refer to Romanians.

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nationality, I’m not talking about citizenship now. [ . . . ] They don’t understand what it means that you’re Romanian, that you’re a Romanian citizen, but your nationality is Hungarian, they just don’t get it. Attila’s initial complaint is interrupted by Zsófi, who emphasizes the stigmatizing categorization that conflates Hungarian not only with Romanian but with the expressly stigmatizing oláh. Attila picks up this theme in a manner that echoes the complaints discussed in the previous section—it is not just a matter of being treated as Romanian but as one who “lives on the streets” or “steals.” Yet in this case there is the additional indignity, articulated in Zsófi’s response, that one’s Hungarianness is not recognized, because people in Hungary “just don’t get” the fact that one can be a Romanian citizen but Hungarian by ethnocultural nationality. This exchange nicely exemplifies both the stigmatizing misrecognition of Transylvanian Hungarians as down-and-out oláh and the failure to distinguish “civic” and ethnocultural meanings of “Hungarian” and “Romanian.” The pervasive ambiguity of the categories “Hungarian” and “Romanian”—referring sometimes to country and citizenship, and at other times to ethnocultural nationality—was central to our discussion of the ways in which ethnicity is enacted, negotiated, and sometimes problematized in everyday interaction.24 Here we see how another aspect of that ambiguity shapes the way in which ethnicity is enacted, negotiated, and often misrecognized in routine encounters between Transylvanian Hungarians and Hungarian citizens in Hungary. In everyday usage in Hungary, where there are no large and politically active national minorities, “Hungarian” and “Romanian” ordinarily designate country of residence and citizenship; in the everyday usage of Transylvanian Hungarians, they designate ethnocultural nationality.25 The cultural and political elite in Hungary, to be sure, are sensitive to the dual meanings of these terms and well aware of the Hungarian minorities in neighboring states; they would never refer to Transylvanian Hungarians as “Romanians.”26 For others, however, “Hungarian” and “Romanian” ordinarily refer to countries. So when a Transylvanian Hungarian in Hungary is referred to—or hears other Transylvanian Hungarians See chapter 7, pp. 213–15. Roma or Gypsies are an important minority in Hungary, but they are not generally understood as a national minority, despite efforts of some Roma ethnopolitical entrepreneurs to represent Roma as a transborder, nonterritorial nation. 26 In Hungarian, it is possible to specify a country-focused meaning of “Romanian” by using the word romániai, which means “from Romania” or “pertaining to Romania,” rather than the more general term román, which can refer either to the country or to the ethnic nationality. In everyday speech, however, this distinction is seldom made. 24 25

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referred to—as “Romanian,” this has an ethnocultural meaning for the hearer that it may altogether lack for the speaker; it can therefore be heard as a challenge to one’s (ethnocultural) Hungarianness even when no such challenge is intended. Another source of difficulty—also visible in the passage quoted above—is the economically and legally precarious position of many labor migrants in Hungary. The most visible labor migrants from Transylvania are the often-bedraggled day laborers assembled in downtown Budapest’s busy Moscow Square, a major transportation hub.27 They are widely perceived as Romanian/Gypsy—a stigmatized “ethnocivic” category of the sort we discussed in the previous section. And many of them do not in fact identify as Hungarian; as we noted above, it is not only Hungarians who are drawn from neighboring Transylvania to Hungary in search of work. The would-be day laborers at Moscow Square are at the lowest end of the pecking order; only the down and out, with no other options, take their chances there. But in the popular imagination, they come to stand for labor migrants in general. The nonrecognition of Transylvanian Hungarians as Hungarians rankles in part because Transylvanian Hungarians, once citizens of Hungary, were involuntarily deprived of that citizenship. When Hungarian territory was carved up after World War I, complained Károly, a thirtysomething stagehand at the Hungarian theater, “no one officially renounced their Hungarian citizenship. [ . . . ] [But] now a lot of people [ . . . ] are going to Hungary and they’re treated like they’re Senegalese, Kyrgyz, or whatever.” Like Zsófi in the preceding excerpt (“as if you were Afghan”), Károly underscores the injustice of being treated like someone with absolutely no connection to Hungary. To be denied recognition as a Hungarian by one’s fellow Hungarians can be a profoundly unsettling, even humiliating experience. Often, this misrecognition or nonrecognition prompts a compensatory reassertion of Hungarianness.28 “They don’t even know what Transylvania is,” explained a recent high school graduate from a well-off family, who had spent a fair amount of time in Hungary. “It doesn’t even occur to them that I, as someone from another country, speak Hungarian better than they do. They don’t get it, I’m from Romania, but I speak Hungarian. So what am I? A Gypsy? A Romanian? Or what?” Similarly, Mari recalled that her daughter Zsuzsa had been asked while studying in Hungary how she knew Hungarian so well: “And they explained to her who Peto´´fi was [Peto´´fi is widely considered Hungary’s greatest poet]. [ . . . ] Okay, there are people there, too, who aren’t so well educated. But to See Sik, “ ‘Emberpiac’ a Moszkva téren.” For a social-psychological discussion of Transylvanian Hungarians’ response to denigration by Hungarians in Hungary, see Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva˘, 71–72. 27 28

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not even know that there are Hungarians living outside of Hungary, that there’s a place called Transylvania?” Complaints like these have circulated so widely that many Transylvanian Hungarians who have never personally experienced such nonrecognition nonetheless “know” that it happens routinely in Hungary. And this commonsense knowledge informs their own thinking about the possibility of working in Hungary. “I could go to Hungary, too,” observed one middle-aged Hungarian, “but for what? There I’m just a stinking oláh.” A similar note was sounded in a group of twenty-something friends: Gergély: [male, sales representative] They pay well in Hungary but— half my family lives there, my older brother, my grandparents, they invited me, I would go, they pay really well. But I’m not going as “a Romanian.” Edina: [female, unemployed] Exactly. [...] Gergély: I’d rather get my ass kicked here. Edina: Me too. Gergély: When I was a kid I got slapped once on the tram because I was speaking //Hungarian [in Cluj] Edina: //Me too [laughter] Gergély: and then you get called “Romanian” there [in Hungary]. I consider myself Hungarian. Imi: [female, accountant] [ . . . ] If I go that far [to Hungary], then I might as well go further. Edina: [ . . . ] You get on the metro [in Budapest] and they check your ticket and there’s some problem, not that I didn’t validate it, but they’re just randomly checking and then “ech, the Romanians are here again in Hungary.” [ . . . ] And so you try to prove to them that your name is purely Hungarian, that you are Hungarian, not Romanian, and stuff like that. I never felt at home in Hungary, except maybe at [Lake] Balaton, which is full of foreigners. Kati and Zsolt, the thirtyish couple we described in chapter 5, agreed about the prevalence of lerománozás but drew differing conclusions. For Kati, it was better to be treated as a Romanian in Hungary than to be a Hungarian in Romania: “If they look down on us there, or if we have some sort of problem, then at least it’s Hungarians [laughing ironically], Hungarians doing it instead of constantly getting called bozgor by Romanians here, making me feel like an idiot.” But Zsolt was not convinced: “I’m not so sure it’d be much better, I don’t think so. [ . . . ] It’s a lot shittier when your own look down on you.” Károly, the stagehand

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quoted above, came down in the middle: “[Hungarians in Hungary] think I’m a Romanian, and then here, it still sucks, because here I’m a Hungarian. So I don’t have a homeland, I’m between the two. [ . . . ] Somehow I’ve got to decide where I belong.” The experience of Transylvanian Hungarian labor migrants in Hungary cannot, of course, be reduced to the micropolitics of recognition and misrecognition. Like labor migrants everywhere, Transylvanian Hungarians who work in Hungary experience economic hardships, bureaucratic problems, and petty humiliations. If they work without proper documents, as many do, they face the same anxieties and uncertainties experienced by other undocumented migrants. Yet they also confront a special set of problems and pitfalls. In Hungary, precisely where one might expect their self-understanding as Hungarian to be validated, that self-understanding is instead called into question (and, in response, expressly reasserted). It is this that makes Hungary an important site for the enactment and negotiation of Hungarianness, even for those Transylvanian Hungarians who have not themselves worked there. Throughout the second half of the book, we have emphasized the disjuncture between nationalist politics and the everyday experience of ethnicity. Here we see another aspect of that disjuncture. Transylvanian Hungarians have been construed in the Hungarian and Transylvanian Hungarian public spheres as members of a border-spanning Hungarian ethnocultural nation. Yet the experience of migration to Hungary, and the thematization of that experience in the commonsense knowledge of Transylvanian Hungarians, have juxtaposed the rhetoric of national inclusion with the experience of national exclusion.29 The contrast between rhetorical inclusion and social exclusion is not experienced by all Transylvanian Hungarians who work in Hungary, and this is not always a salient or enduring concern even for those who do experience such exclusion. Many Transylvanian Hungarians have settled in Hungary and, over time, have come to think of it as home. But the disjuncture between the political rhetoric of inclusion in a transborder nation and the social experience of exclusion from that nation points to a broader disjuncture between the way controversial issues and public figures are framed and discussed in the public sphere and the way they are experienced and talked about in everyday life. It is this issue to which we turn in the next chapter. 29 Fox, “National Identities on the Move.” For a theoretically informed ethnographic analysis of the disjuncture between the rhetoric of shared national identity and the social experience of profound difference in postunification Germany, see Glaeser, Divided in Unity.

Chapter 12




POLITICS

Our book opened with the story of the theft of the flag from the Hungarian consulate on the main square of Cluj. This epitomized the outrageous, in-your-face style of local nationalist politics during the twelve-year tenure of Mayor Gheorghe Funar; but it also illustrated the considerable popular indifference to and distance from that politics. Now we have come full circle. We return in this chapter to our point of departure, nationalist politics, examining it here through the medium of everyday talk. Few Clujeni are preoccupied with politics, fewer still with nationalist politics. Measured by conventional indicators, political participation is limited to voting for most Clujeni, as it is for most people throughout East Central Europe. Yet politics is a recurring, though intermittent, subject of everyday conversation. This does not mean that people routinely have “serious” political discussions, involving sustained and substantive consideration of political issues. It does not mean that Clujeni are models of informed citizens, or that their political talk meets stringent standards of discursive rationality.1 But it does mean that there are many and varied everyday occasions for talking about politics. Such talk can be occasioned by the doings and sayings of well-known (and especially of controversial) public figures, by salient local or distant events, or by public controversies that spill over into private conversation. It can also be prompted in a more mundane fashion. Complaints about prices and, more broadly, about dismal economic conditions can segue into political talk, as when Clujeni blame specific politicians or politics in general for the sorry state of affairs. Fragments of news that filter in through the media—or through friends, colleagues, and acquaintances talking about what they have heard from the media—can provide good material for complaints or for amusing or outrageous stories. “Have you heard what they have done now?” or “I can’t believe what I just read in the paper” are characteristic ways of introducing such media-prompted talk. Occasionally even a piece of good news—such as the announcement that Romanian citizens would no longer need visas for travel to most European countries—can prompt political talk. 1 For an historically informed discussion and critique of the exigent—and unrealistic—ideal of the “informed citizen” in the American context, see Schudson, The Good Citizen; on discursive rationality more generally in the public sphere, see Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.

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All these provide occasions for “talking politics.” As William Gamson has emphasized in his book of that name, ordinary people often manage to make good sense of political issues, drawing on personal experience and commonsense knowledge as well as on the media. Yet while Gamson is concerned to emphasize that “people are quite capable of conducting informed and well-reasoned discussions about issues,”2 there are many other ways of talking politics, including derisive, scornful, dismissive, cynical, or joking talk. As Mari’s son Zoli put it, politics “is good for laughs, it’s like a comic book [ . . . ] they fight, mumble, bumble, whatever.” Though scarcely an example of good civics, such dismissive talk is itself a manner of “talking politics”; it, too, reflects—and in part constitutes—political experience for ordinary Clujeni.3 Much political talk embodies and expresses distance from and disgust with politics and politicians.4 Disparaging talk about politicians focuses on several characteristic themes. One is corruption. We noted in chapter 6 the heavily moralized language with which ordinary Clujeni discuss who gets ahead—and how they do so. Politicians, along with businessmen, are the chief targets of such moralized rhetoric. “They’re all thieves” is a common verdict (and rhymes nicely in Romanian: tot¸i îs hot¸i). Ethnicity is seen as irrelevant in this respect: “A politician is a politician, whatever their ethnicity,” remarked an economics student in a group discussion. Some Clujeni see corruption as so pervasive—“The Mafia is more powerful than in Italy,” observed an unskilled factory worker in a Romanian group discussion—that it could be uprooted only by an authoritarian leader, strong enough to “keep everyone in line,” as a skilled worker in the same group put it. This discussion took place during the election campaign of 2000, in which Vadim Tudor, the presidential candidate of the ultranationalist Greater Romania Party (GRP), presented himself as a populist crusader against corruption. “That’s what Vadim wants to do now,” continued a third participant, a lathe operator, “jail the ones with the villas [the corrupt ones]. He said he’d confiscate [everything] in forty-eight hours.” Vadim’s name was sometimes invoked alongside the historical figure of Vlad T¸epes¸ (Vlad the Impaler), leg2 Gamson, Talking Politics; the quotation is from the back cover of the softcover edition. See also pp. 4ff., 175. 3 Zoli is an instance of what Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics, 154, calls “vehement disengagement.” The “strenuously unserious” cynics Eliasoph describes talk more about politics than any others, but they do so as a kind of “conspiracy against gullibility”; their joking enacts “a form of solidarity aimed at displaying immunity to politics” (158). Of course, political talk of this sort— in which politics is an object of ridicule and a source of jokes—is not peculiar to Cluj, or to Eastern Europe; witness the success of “The Daily Show” and other political satire on television. 4 Distance from politics is often an embodied stance, not simply an “opinion”; it often has a pronounced body-behavioral dimension, conveyed by snorts, sighs, and rolled eyes.

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endary for his merciless treatment of thieves. A fortyish male worker in another group discussion wistfully quoted a famous line from Romania’s great national poet Mihai Eminescu: “Where are you, T¸epes¸, our Lord? If we had Vadim now . . .”5 A second recurring theme is incompetence. “They’re all idiots,” was Zoli’s summary judgment. The scorn with which politicians are often treated is vividly conveyed in the following exchange from a group discussion involving Romanian workers in their forties with limited education: Veta: It’s hard, what can you do? Nelu: It’s really hard, and politics. . . . It’s complicated, very complicated. Veta: Life’s hard, politics is hard. Nelu: Politics is not hard. You sit on your ass all day and make good money. [laughter] Veta: Yeah, you can see them sleeping, eating popcorn, laughing with each other. I don’t get it, what kind of country is this? You watch Parliament on TV and it makes you want to laugh. Or it pisses you off so much you don’t even want to watch TV any more. Mariana: Who put them there? We’re the ones that voted for them, we put them there to sleep. They don’t care about our rights, not at all, only their own interests. A final theme—as the closing comment in this exchange suggests—is that politicians, even if not blatantly corrupt, pursue and protect only their own interests. Politicians are seen as a distinct group, with interests sharply opposed to those of ordinary people, including their putative constituents.6 (For Hungarians, as we shall see below, it is not just politicians in general, but those of “their own” party in particular, who come in for criticism on this score.) Seeking to stir up ethnic tensions is seen as 5 The theme remains current: see plate 23 for election graffiti featuring Vlad T ¸epes¸ from the 2004 presidential campaign. 6 Verdery, “Nationalism and National Sentiment,” 191–97 argues that the moralizing, homogenizing, essentializing we-they distinction promoted by communist regimes was internalized, but transformed in content and evaluative thrust, by ordinary people, to whom the party-state itself (rather than the class enemy) came increasingly to be experienced as a central constitutive “other.” She goes on to argue that this helps explain the resonance of postcommunist nationalist rhetoric, as another “they”—an alien nationality with whom communists had historically been identified in many contexts in any event—took the place of the regime in popular understandings. This is a powerful explanation, but in a sense it is too powerful, for it would lead one to expect greater popular receptivity to extreme nationalism (and extreme antisemitism) in postcommunist Romania and elsewhere than has in fact occurred. The identification of the regime as “they” by alienated citizens, it may be suggested, has not simply been transferred to ethnonational others, but has persisted: the postcommunist regime continues to be widely understood in moralizing terms as a corrupt “them” that is sharply distinguished from “us” (ordinary people).

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a key way in which politicians—Romanian and Hungarian alike— pursue their own interests at the expense of ordinary Clujeni. Ileana: I think this whole question of . . . the Romanians and the Hungarians . . . This is . . . Daniela: A question of politics. Ileana: It’s a question //of politics and— Silviu: //Of politics, and it’s fueled by people who have an interest in it. This seemingly trivial exchange from a group discussion involving young, educated Romanians illustrates the consensual, commonsense nature of this understanding: Daniela and Silviu collaborate to complete the thought introduced by Ileana, and all three agree that RomanianHungarian tensions are cultivated by politicians. Similar comments were made in other group discussions. A young cosmetics salesperson observed in a Romanian discussion that frictions between Romanians and Hungarians were “fed by politicians so that their parties will survive.” Making the same point in a Hungarian discussion, a small businessman in his mid-twenties added that, as a result, we “get all worked up and forget our real problems.” There is a common saying in both Romanian and Hungarian that concisely captures this commonsense understanding: “It’s their [politicians’] bread and butter”—literally “that’s what they live off ” (din asta tra˘iesc; abból élnek) Even as they distance themselves, often vehemently, from corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving politicians, many Clujeni have enough everyday knowledge of politics to be able to talk about it in some detail. And stories about political goings-on, especially amusing or outrageous ones, can make for good conversational material—better, at least, than predictable complaints about prices. Everyday conversation about public affairs is therefore biased toward ridicule and indignation.7 But political talk is not simply a means of amusement; even “strenuously unserious” political talk provides an occasion for enacting solidarity. We are interested here in the manner and modality of political talk, not simply (or even primarily) in the substance of popular political opinion; we attend as much to how people talk about politics as to what they say about the major issues. For this reason, we draw our data here primarily from group discussions. In these discussions, participants—most of whom knew one another, often quite well, before the discussions— were speaking, arguing, telling stories, and laughing with one another, rather than reporting their views to an interviewer. Most of the political 7 This bias is most notable in group settings, especially in informal contexts, and especially among young people. More “earnest” stances are more likely to be adopted in one-on-one conversation.

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talk in these discussions emerged without specific prompting; to a considerable extent, we were thus able to avoid eliciting the artifactual opinions, produced for and oriented to the researcher, that are generated by asking people directly about their political views.8 And the use of recorded interactional data enables us to capture the flavor and convey the stance and style of everyday political talk.9 Yet while lightly moderated, minimally structured group discussions among friends and colleagues generate richly interactive, and for the most part unprompted, talk, such talk is nonetheless produced in a special and artificial social setting. In selecting excerpts from group discussions to quote here, we have therefore chosen data that we know from participant observation to be broadly representative of the ways Clujeni talk about politics in everyday life. We do not claim that the data we present here are representative of the political topics discussed by Clujeni. We have selected topics that are centrally related to ethnopolitical debate; yet most everyday political talk—among Romanians, the vast majority of such talk—has no relation to ethnicity or nationalism. The data presented here are representative, rather, of the manner, mood, and style of everyday political talk; and for the four topics we consider, they are also representative of the range of views. By focusing in this chapter on political talk, we capture one important aspect of the everyday political experience of ordinary Clujeni. Yet while the relation of ordinary Clujeni to politics is expressed—and in part constituted—in talk, it is also expressed in silence. Distance from politics is sometimes (as in the examples quoted above) an articulated stance, but such distance is not always articulated. The data on which we rely in this chapter cannot help but overstate the frequency of political talk— and the salience of ethnopolitical themes in particular—in everyday conversation. As we observed in earlier chapters, ethnicity is only intermittently salient in everyday life; the same holds for politics and, a fortiori, for nationalist politics. 8 Politics was one of three broad themes introduced in the two-hour group discussions. But it was introduced in very general terms, without mentioning any specific political issues, by way of a brief question about whether politics mattered for ordinary people in their everyday lives. The discussion was then allowed to run its own course for twenty minutes to a half-hour, with little or no intervention from the moderator. Only toward the end of the segment allocated to politics (usually thirty–forty-five minutes) did the moderator bring up specific political issues (when these did not surface spontaneously, as they often did). Even in these cases, we let the ensuing discussion follow its own interactive dynamic, and we draw our data chiefly from participants’ responses to one another, rather than from their responses to the occasional moderator’s prompt. 9 Almost all of the political talk we analyze in this chapter occurred in intra-Hungarian or intra-Romanian discussions. As we observed in chapter 10, politics—and especially ethnopolitical issues—tends to be avoided in mixed company. On the composition of discussion groups, see appendix B, “A Note on Data.”

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We have emphasized above the asymmetries in the way ethnicity is experienced and enacted in Cluj. These extend to the way Hungarians and Romanians talk about politics. We do not mean simply that most Hungarians and Romanians hold sharply differing views on ethnopolitically controversial issues, views that are often (but not always) variants of the standardized “Hungarian” and “Romanian” positions on such issues that are articulated by politicians. We mean also that there are differences in the form of political talk. The most important of these, which follows from the generally greater salience of ethnicity for Hungarians, is simply that Hungarians are more interested in ethnopolitical issues, and more inclined to interpret other political issues in ethnic terms, than Romanians; political talk is more often ethnopolitical talk for Hungarians than for Romanians. This difference is expressed not only in what subjects are discussed, but also in how they are discussed. The four topics we have selected— Mayor Funar, the DAHR, autonomy, and Hungary’s Status Law—are understood by all as ethnopolitically charged subjects. Yet these topics are not always discussed in ethnic terms. Mayor Funar, for example, was an inescapable presence in the lives of Clujeni for twelve years. His penchant for attention-grabbing rhetoric and gestures made him a prime source for conversational material. Yet Hungarians and Romanians talked about him in very different ways. Hungarians were acutely sensitive to Funar’s hypernationalist rhetoric; for most Romanians, supporters and opponents of Funar, this was much less salient. The asymmetry is expressed in a different way in talk about the DAHR. Although it is consistently supported by Hungarians at the polls, the DAHR provokes a great deal of critical, dismissive, even disdainful talk among Hungarians. The critical talk is based on familiarity, proximity, and “ownership”; it reflects Hungarians’ understanding that the DAHR, like it or not, is “their” party. When Romanians talk about the DAHR, it is from a much greater distance. The third topic we consider, autonomy, both unites and divides Romanians and Hungarians. In the discourse of political elites, which is sometimes appropriated by ordinary Clujeni, autonomy is framed in ethnic terms and is a deeply polarizing issue, axiomatically desirable for Hungarians, axiomatically indefensible for Romanians. When framed in regional terms, by contrast, as it often is in ordinary talk, autonomy is a subject on which most Romanians and Hungarians talk in surprisingly similar ways; both support greater administrative and financial autonomy for Transylvania vis-à-vis Bucharest. The final topic we consider is the “Status Law,” adopted by Hungary

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for Transylvanian and other transborder Hungarians.10 By creating an official status to which certain benefits were attached, this law seemed directly relevant to those who could (or might) qualify. It therefore elicited talk about who could—and who should—count as “Hungarian” for the purpose of the law, talk that expressed both instrumentalist and primordialist understandings of ethnicity.

Funar When asked about the mayor in a group discussion, six young Hungarian friends responded with a chorus of dismissive laughter. This was not atypical. Although there were a number of protests against Funar’s initiatives during his first few years in office, by the second half of the 1990s many Hungarians—young people, especially—were finding it difficult to take Funar seriously.11 When his name came up, they would snort and roll their eyes. Funar inspired not fear, anxiety, or concern but contempt, derision, disgust, annoyance, and, not uncommonly, amusement. He was referred to in mock-affectionate terms as “Gyuri,” a diminutive of the Hungarian form of his first name; even Romanians occasionally jokingly referred to him using this Hungarian diminutive. He was characterized not as dangerous but as “crazy,” “sick,” “an idiot,” “a clown,” and “a cretin.” Yet Funar was not only elected but twice re-elected as mayor of Cluj, before finally being turned out of office in 2004. He had his detractors among Romanians, too, especially among the well-educated, but he managed over a span of twelve years to win the approval—at the polls, at least—of a substantial majority of Romanian Clujeni. This led some observers to conclude that extreme nationalism has substantial support in Cluj (and elsewhere in Transylvania, where fellow radical nationalist Vadim Tudor stunned observers by capturing 29 percent of the firstround vote in the 2000 presidential elections, before losing in the second round to Ion Iliescu). Yet inferring the strength of nationalist sentiment from electoral data is problematic.12 Funar seems to have won election 10 Unlike the first three topics, which were recurrent subjects of political talk throughout the period of our field research, the Status Law emerged as an issue only in the late 1990s, prompted considerable attention and controversy for a year or so, and then faded into the background. 11 See chapter 4, pp. 144–46. 12 The massive first-round support for Vadim Tudor, for example, was in large part a protest vote, expressing profound disenchantment with mainstream parties and politicians (Gallagher, Theft of a Nation, 252–59; on the difficulties involved in interpreting the electoral support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, see Kitschelt, “The Contemporary Radical Right”). It is clear that Funar’s supporters were not seriously put off by his nationalist rhetoric;

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and re-election as much in spite of as because of his hyperbolic nationalist rhetoric; he was supported by many because he was considered, in the standard phrase, a bun gospodar (good manager or steward). With the passing of time, Funar lost the power to shock, scandalize, and mobilize that he had during his first years in office. To many Clujeni, his outrageous antics became routine. What might appear striking or shocking to an outsider—painting sidewalk garbage bins in the colors of the Romanian flag, for instance—barely warranted a passing glance to locals. “When you see this stuff every day,” said Zoli, “every post [referring to the short, tricolor posts that lined many streets], every street corner, it doesn’t bother you any more, you don’t care, it becomes something completely ordinary.” Even the theft of the Hungarian flag from the Consulate failed to shock most Hungarians, though some were still upset and scandalized by this and other symbolic provocations. “He just abuses his power!” Karcsi exclaimed. “How can he just steal the flag of a consulate? That building is Hungarian territory [ . . . ] how dare he go there! And then he promises to reward the thieves!” Most Hungarians attributed Funar’s electoral success to his nationalism. As a young accountant put it in a group discussion, “most people are quite happy everything’s painted red, yellow, and blue.” For Hungarians, Funar was first and foremost anti-Hungarian; they assumed that Romanians saw things similarly. And some Romanians did approve of Funar’s nationalism. “It suits me just fine,” said an unemployed twentyyear-old high school graduate. “And it’s perfectly normal. Should we let Hungarians push us around our own country?” Others, without supporting Funar’s nationalism, nonetheless saw it as in some way justifiable and explainable. Emilia, for example, found his nationalism “exaggerated,” yet understandable as a reaction to Hungarians’ own “exaggerated claims” and nationalist “provocations.” Yet for many, probably most Romanian Clujeni, including both supporters and critics of the mayor, Funar’s nationalism was decidedly secondary. Romanians were of course aware of his anti-Hungarian rhetoric; but few took it seriously. As we have seen, many Hungarians did not take it seriously either. Still, it was much harder for Hungarians than for Romanians to ignore the rhetoric. Hungarians were often offended by

but this does not mean that they supported him because of that rhetoric. One could argue that his supporters’ tolerance (if not active support) for the mayor’s intolerant rhetoric is itself an indicator of nationalist sentiment among the electorate. But nationalist sentiment is a notoriously vague notion: while Funar’s electoral success may be an indicator of some kind of widespread nationalist sentiment, it cannot be taken as an indicator of salient, mobilized, aggressive nationalist attitudes among his supporters. And Funar’s dismal showing in 2004 suggests that his support had more to do with political conjuncture than with abiding nationalist sentiment.

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Funar’s nationalism even when they did not take it seriously; Romanians could more easily discount or ignore it. As a student put it in a group discussion, “Some say that he’s a nationalist, or that he’s an extremist. He may well be, but for me it doesn’t matter, what matters is what he’s done as mayor.” For this Funar supporter, strikingly, Funar’s nationalism did not count as part of what he had done as mayor. Romanians who disapproved of Funar’s nationalism—and there were many, especially among the better-educated and long-term residents of the town—appealed to their own identity as Romanians, and to their own understanding of the appropriate uses of the national flag, to deny that Funar was speaking for them.13 Claudiu and Lucian, for example, were put off by Funar’s indiscriminate use of the national colors: Claudiu: All this stupid stuff, painting the benches, and now he painted the posts, I mean c’mon, fine, he’s the mayor, fine, he painted them, fine, he’s a nationalist, fine, whatever, but c’mon, he goes too far. Lucian: [ . . . ] Some law should tell you where the national colors can be used, you know, the flag. Instead of putting it on the posts and on the benches, where you sit your ass down, you know? Other Romanians qualified or even denied Funar’s membership in the category “Romanian.” Funar was described by a student as “too Romanian” in one group discussion; and for Zoli’s wife, Anca, “He’s not Romanian, he’s not a patriot, he’s crazy.”14 More salient to Romanian critics of Funar were aesthetic and economic concerns. For a young cook in a group discussion, the pits in the main square “look terrible. At least if he’d covered them up the way he said he would, [but] he hasn’t done anything. . . . People throw their garbage in it, it’s a disaster.” A middle-aged cleaning woman in another group discussion commented that Funar “shouldn’t have made so many statues. Better to use the money for something else.” Similar comments were made in Hungarian group discussions, such as this one by a shoe store clerk: “He keeps painting the flagpoles around King Matthias red, yellow [and blue], and it’s your money going to that, mine, too, everyone’s, but why isn’t he fixing the roads with that money?” For other Clujeni, the younger generation in particular, Funar was a figure of fun, a buffoon.15 This emerged especially clearly in a group discussion involving students from an elite Hungarian high school. “We really have fun with this stuff Funar does,” said one student, to assent and laughter from the others. “It’s not always serious politics,” she continued, See chapter 7, pp. 226–27. See chapter 7, p. 231. 15 For an elaboration of this theme, see Fox, “Missing the Mark,” 387–89. 13 14

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“we see it as, ‘Oh God, what bullshit!’ ” When pressed as to whether they discussed Funar with one another, the response from another student was unequivocal: “No, we amuse ourselves with him.” Or as a thirtysomething Hungarian woman who worked for the Catholic Church put it in another group discussion, “Funar’s the clown of the country, just like back when the king’s court had its jester [laughter]. Funar has exactly the same style [ . . . ] and we really laugh at him.” The group of friends we introduced at the beginning of this section kept coming back to Funar for amusement. When their political talk turned more serious, one participant asked, “Can’t we go back to Funar? I like that better.” Another promptly obliged by launching into mock praise of the pits in the main square.16 Notwithstanding the exasperation, amusement, and contempt felt by virtually all Hungarians and some Romanians, Funar obviously had plenty of supporters in town. Most supporters referred to his managerial skills, and observed that he had repaired the roads, cleaned up the town, and painted facades in the city center. Few Hungarians, though, would concede this point. A good manager, they argued, would have courted foreign investors; Funar’s administration, with a reputation for corruption and for flouting the law, had scared them away. The ways in which Clujeni talked about Funar were not indicative of the breadth of his support. Many Romanian Clujeni supported Funar as a bun gospodar, but this did not make for good conversational material. Even Funar’s supporters were drawn to talk more about the mayor’s more notorious sayings and doings. “Did you see how clean that street was?” is not exactly a promising conversational move. But “Did you see what he’s painted now?” (the reference to the Romanian national colors being understood) provided something to talk, complain, or laugh about. It was Funar’s flamboyant style that kept people talking about him. As Anca put it, “You sit down to watch TV and you say, ‘What’s he done this time?’ [laughter], it becomes a masquerade, you know, it’s like a circus, you wait to see what comes next.” On another occasion, in the midst of an extended riff on Funar’s antics, Zoli mentioned the latest incident, in which Funar had left beef bones tied in Romanian tricolor ribbons on the chairs of the City Council members who had voted against him. (Funar later protested when this “modern art exhibit” was removed.) “Did you hear about this?” Zoli’s mother, Mari, chimed in, signaling that this was a good story, and marking it as “news.” We have sought to illustrate how Clujeni talked about Funar, not what Clujeni thought about Funar, or why they voted for or against him. If Funar-talk was skewed toward the comic, this was partly be16

Artists, too, had fun with Funar; see chapter 4, p. 141n73.

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cause people did not take him seriously; but it was also because those who did take him seriously had no need, in everyday talk among friends and family, to articulate in a sober and straightforward way their reasons for supporting or opposing the mayor. Opposition to Funar was taken for granted, for example, among Hungarians (and in many Romanian circles as well); in these contexts, a sober explanation of one’s reasons for opposing Funar would have verged on the absurd. After his initial appearance on the political scene, which was indeed deeply unsettling to many Clujeni, Funar became a familiar figure, yet one who reliably produced new and highly “tellable” conversational material. We have been interested in Funar-talk, as in other forms of everyday political talk, not because it mirrored underlying opinions about or attitudes toward Funar—as we have indicated, it did not—but because such talk was an important element of everyday political experience for Clujeni during the Funar years. DAHR Most Hungarians take it for granted that, come election time, they will support the DAHR. “It’s obvious,” noted Mari, “that if you’re Hungarian, you’re for the DAHR. That much is clear.” This does not necessarily mean joining the party, respecting its leaders, or even agreeing with its policies. But voting for the DAHR is widely understood as an ethnic obligation. For Hungarians—though not for Romanians: another asymmetry—parliamentary elections therefore serve as a kind of census.17 Hungarians also encounter in some milieux the expectation that they should support the DAHR as dues-paying members. And indeed many do so: the nearly 18,000 members in Cluj comprise about 30 percent of the town’s Hungarian population. For many Hungarians, DAHR membership, like voting, expresses ethnonational identity rather than class 17 On the manner in which elections can be reduced to censuses in some ethnically divided societies, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 83–87; for an exemplary study of the Indian case, see Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. The DAHR share of the vote in elections for the Chamber of Deputies in 1990, 1992, 1996, and 2000, respectively, was 7.2 percent, 7.5 percent, 6.6 percent, and 6.8 percent—results closely tracking the Hungarian share of the population (7.2 percent in 1992, 6.6 percent in 2002). (Data on Romanian elections between 1990 and 2004 are available at http://www.cspp.strath.ac.uk/index.html?romelec.html.) One local Hungarian sociologist, asked in the late 1990s about evidence suggesting a shrinking Hungarian population in Cluj, replied that he did not think the population was shrinking, since the share of the vote going to the DAHR in local and national elections was relatively constant in Cluj. As the 2002 census revealed, this turned out to be mistaken (see chapter 4, pp. 158–59). But the interesting point is that the sociologist understood local election figures as a proxy for a census. On the challenge posed to the DAHR after the completion of our fieldwork by dissident Hungarian organizations that favor a more aggressive pursuit of autonomy, see Kántor and Majtényi, “Autonómiamodellek Erdélyben.”

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interests or political ideology; this is not the case for Romanians, even those who support nationalist politics. Some Hungarians resent the expectation that ethnicity should govern political affiliation. Károly, the theater stagehand introduced previously, put it this way in a group discussion: If this stupid, ultranationalist trash [referring to Romanian nationalist parties) would disappear, there wouldn’t be much reason for the DAHR to exist either [ . . . ] they wouldn’t have to be so loudmouthed, you know? Because then you could just join the Peasant Party or the Liberal Party or whatever. [ . . . ] But the way it is now, the Hungarians who are [really] Hungarian—they’re the ones who make it out to be our national obligation to join the DAHR. Even if social pressures in Cluj were not strong enough to oblige all Hungarians to join the DAHR, Hungarians could still find themselves called to account for not doing so, and most could not even think of joining another party. Yet voting for the DAHR and even paying membership dues do not preclude a critical stance toward the party. Many Hungarians talk about the DAHR with the same combination of scorn, contempt, and ridicule with which other parties in Romania are discussed. Hungarians share the general disdain for parties and politicians, including “their own.” They are especially likely to express their contempt for or criticism of “their own” politicians, precisely because they are their own. Among themselves, many Hungarians are openly dismissive of the DAHR. The relation of Cluj Hungarians to “their” party is a close one. Because the DAHR is headquartered in Cluj, and because the Hungarian world in Cluj is smaller and more intimate than the wider Romanian world, politics is personalized for Hungarians to a greater extent than for Romanians. The statewide politics of “their” party is centered in Cluj, and many Hungarian Clujeni know the leading players, or at least know a fair amount about them. (Statewide politics for all the major Romanian parties is centered in Bucharest, and few Romanian Clujeni know party leaders personally.) Here as elsewhere, familiarity intensifies resentment and contempt. When the DAHR was introduced in one Hungarian group discussion, the participants—the same group of twenty-something friends that kept coming back to Funar for amusement—responded dismissively with a collective “Phsssssh.” They could not take the DAHR seriously. Géza, a self-described unsuccessful poet, ridiculed the DAHR president: “Ten years ago [he] comes out as a poet—a bad poet [laughter].” He continued, “Then you’ve got [another top leader], who’s a businessman in [a town in the Szekler area] and who not long from now [ . . . ] will own 60

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percent of the entire region. [ . . . ] This is the guy who wrote Comrade Elena Ceaus¸escu’s doctoral dissertation in chemistry.” Géza’s friend Laci piled on: “That’s one wing [of the party], the corrupt ones; in the other wing, you’ve got [this guy] who in theory is a lawyer, in practice is a complete alcoholic. [laughter] [ . . . . ]. Then there’s the boxer [laughter] with the broken nose [ . . . ], who you can also find in the [ . . . ] Music Pub when he has a little free time.” For this group of friends, the DAHR’s leaders were figures of fun, though Laci’s conclusion was more sober: “I’ve lost my trust in them.” The DAHR presents itself not only, or even primarily, as a political party, but first and foremost as an umbrella organization devoted to promoting the interests of all Hungarians in all spheres of life.18 This led many Hungarians to expect the DAHR to address not only culturally and politically “Hungarian” issues (involving language, Hungarian schools, and political representation) but also issues such as jobs, pensions, health care, and social services. Few Hungarians feel that the DAHR has been successful in addressing these pragmatic concerns. One participant in a group discussion bitterly condemned the DAHR for failing to help his paralyzed brother: “No one helped him, absolutely no one has helped him with anything. So why should I join the DAHR?” The following exchange between Jóska, a printer, and Károly, the theater stagehand quoted above, is typical: Jóska: So you see, I criticize the DAHR, not because they ask for much and give so //little. Károly: //No, that’s not my problem with them either. Jóska: But because the DAHR is an interest-defending organization and its task ought to be [to defend] the interests of the Hungarians. . . . So I ask, when I was unemployed and I went to the DAHR [ . . . ] and I asked about work— well, they should deal with this sort of thing, too. “We don’t deal with this.” But then who does? Whose interests . . . Károly: See, that’s exactly it! The DAHR is the kind of interestdefending organization that defends its own interests, you know? In this and other cases, the DAHR is criticized for being too concerned with matters Hungarian, that is, with symbolic ethnopolitical issues, and insufficiently concerned with things that matter to Hungarians. The DAHR claims to represent them in their capacity as Hungarians; but as we observed in chapter 6, there is nothing specifically Hungarian about ordinary Hungarians’ most pressing concerns. While claiming to repre18

On this duality, see Kántor, “Nationalizing Minorities,” 256–58.

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sent the interests of all Hungarians, moreover, the DAHR is seen by many Hungarians as more interested in pursuing its own interests (and as differing little from other parties in this respect). And since it claims to be the party of and for Hungarians, it comes in for special criticism from Hungarians. In effect, Hungarians reserve the right, as Hungarians, to criticize and denigrate the DAHR. Faced with Romanian criticisms of the party, though, they might well defend it, along the lines of the old adage: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Romanians also criticize the DAHR; but they do not do so in the same way. It is not “their” party; they are much more distant from it.19 They often conflate the DAHR and “the Hungarians.” Romanians’ knowledge of the DAHR comes from the media, and their complaints are often framed as complaints about what “the Hungarians” want. Especially for those whose networks do not include many Hungarians, it is easy to imagine that “the Hungarians” are a unified and disciplined group for whom the DAHR speaks. It is a common theme that “they”—Hungarians—are “more united than we.” “They’re so united,” remarked a pharmacy employee in a group discussion, “and I don’t know why, but they’re united against Romanians.” This image of Hungarians as thinking with a single mind leads some Romanians to attribute to all Hungarians, not just a few “extremists,” an unspoken desire to reunite with Hungary: Alex: [unemployed high-school graduate] They [the Hungarians] don’t say anything, but if they had a chance, they’d grab it. They’d ask for Transylvania to be part of Hungary again, or something like that. Camelia: [nursing school student] Those are the extremists. Mis¸u: [college student] Not— now they’re not //the extremists Alex: //They’re not the extremists. They’d all make these demands. For many Romanians, it is easy to identify the party with its putative constituency, and to treat “the Hungarians” as a single political actor.

Autonomy For politicians and journalists, autonomy is a deeply polarizing and heavily fraught term and concept. In the Hungarian public sphere, autonomy is the central political desideratum and demand; even those who 19 There is no party that is generally understood as the party of and for Romanians in the way the DAHR is understood to be the party of and for Hungarians. Although the extreme nationalist Party of Romanian National Unity and Greater Romania Party claim to be parties of and for Romanians, they are not understood in this way by most Romanians.

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agree on little else (including what autonomy means and what specific form it should take) agree on this. It is inconceivable to be Hungarian and to be against autonomy. In the Romanian public sphere, autonomy is prevailingly portrayed as a dangerous stepping-stone toward “separatism” or secession; as a result, it has been difficult to argue for autonomy in any form.20 Among ordinary Clujeni, autonomy is much less polarizing.21 Stances and arguments from the respective public spheres do sometimes carry over into everyday talk. Most Hungarians treat autonomy as an unquestionable good, even when they have only the foggiest idea what it would entail. A Transylvanian Hungarian anthropologist reported that when visiting his mother in her Szekler village on one occasion, one of the first things she said to him was, “We sure do need that autonomy, don’t we?”22 She did not have to explain herself; it was simply assumed that, as a Hungarian, she (and her son) supported autonomy. Without having to know what exactly is meant by autonomy, Hungarians can express their support for it as Hungarians, as a way of “being Hungarian.” Similarly, some Romanians reflexively reject autonomy, automatically associating it with what “the Hungarians” want. Yet in ordinary conversation, autonomy is often understood as a Transylvanian, not a Hungarian issue. When framed in ethnonational terms, and organized around an opposition between Hungarian autonomy and the Romanian nation-state, the issue is starkly polarizing. When framed in regional terms, and organized around an opposition between Transylvania and the central government in Bucharest (or between Transylvania and the south), autonomy seems desirable to almost all Clujeni. Most Clujeni, for example, think that Bucharest (or “the south”) is siphoning off Transylvania’s wealth.23 In a folk-sociological counterpart to Samuel Huntington’s theory, they see the frontier separating Transylvania 20 This is indicated by the ferocious political response to Cluj-based Romanian journalist Sabin Gherman’s provocatively entitled manifesto, “I’m Fed Up with Romania,” published in the Monitorul de Cluj, September 16, 1998. Although this call for greater administrative and financial autonomy for Transylvania had no organized political support behind it, it caused an immediate furor in the Romanian public sphere, reported in detail in Gherman et al., M-am sa˘turat de Romaˆnia!. Since 1998, Gherman has sought to build political support for autonomy, but with little success. Between 2000 and 2002, the Transylvanian journal Provincia (http://www.provincia .ro/), a joint undertaking of Hungarian and Romanian liberal intellectuals, published in both languages, carried on a sustained discussion about autonomy, decentralization, and the regional distinctiveness of Transylvania; but this had little resonance outside of the small liberal intelligentsia. For an analysis of the regionalism debate, see Ungureanu, “Autonomy, Regionalism and Minority Rights”; see also Costache, “Constructing the ‘Transylvanian Identity’ ” for an analysis of the discussion in Provincia. 21 It should be noted, though, that autonomy is discussed much less frequently than Funar or the DAHR in ordinary conversation. 22 Interview with Zoltán Biró, March 1995, Miercurea-Ciuc (Csíkszereda). 23 For more interactional data on regional categories, see chapter 7, pp. 232–37.

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from the rest of the country as a civilizational divide. With its Habsburg legacy, traditions of effective governance, and disciplined labor force, Transylvania is set against the “backward” south (and Moldavia), with their Ottoman legacy, corrupt government, and lazy workers.24 As a middle-aged Romanian taxi driver put it, in the south “they don’t work, they rely on Transylvanians, since we’re the ones who work. [ . . . ] The money goes to Bucharest. And the influence from the south is no good, that Balkan influence. [ . . . ] You know what it’s like with Transylvania? It’s like you’re swimming with your head above water, but they— Bucharest and Moldavia—they cling to us and drag us down, under the water.” A Romanian student summed up this view with a recently coined but already popular saying: “This country’s like a cow that grazes in Transylvania and gets milked in Bucharest.” Given this widely shared perception of a civilizational divide, many Clujeni support financial and administrative autonomy for Transylvania, believing that this would keep the wealth of the province from being leeched away by the putatively unproductive and parasitic south. As the young cook quoted above put it in a Romanian group discussion, “The money Transylvania makes from its mines or, I don’t know, whatever we have here, should stay in Transylvania. [Indignantly] What’s going on? How come the state gets all the money? They should distribute it in Transylvania, [but] our money gets redistributed to other places.” A young musician put things similarly in a Hungarian group discussion: “We pay the second highest taxes [after Bucharest], and they still won’t give us autonomy. If we’re paying so much in taxes, we should get more money back so that we can work things out in our region.” Many Romanians who support financial and administrative autonomy 24 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 158 argues that “the great historical line that has existed for centuries separating Western Christian peoples from Muslim and Orthodox peoples . . . provides a clear-cut and compelling answer to the question. . . . ‘Where does Europe end?’ ” The line—boldly drawn on a map labeled “The Eastern Boundary of Western Civilization” (159)—divides Finland, Estonia, and Latvia from Russia, and then runs through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia. Civilizational rhetoric has been used in the Baltic states, Slovenia, and Croatia to justify their incorporation into—and the exclusion of their eastern neighbors from—European institutions. Much more subtle than Huntington, yet recognizing the importance of the Orthodox/Catholic divide in shaping nationhood and nationalism in East Central Europe, are Armstrong’s Nations Before Nationalism and “Toward a Framework for Considering Nationalism in East Europe.” For a critique of the notion of a clear civilizational fault line that bounds “Europe,” see Hann, “Culture and Civilization in Central Europe.” Some Transylvanian intellectuals have drawn on Huntington’s analysis to support claims for Transylvanian autonomy; see especially Molnár, “The Transylvanian Question,” and the commentaries it occasioned, collected in Andreescu and Molnár, eds., Problema transilvana˘. For an intepretation of this sort of civilizational argumentation as a form of “internal orientalism,” see Turda, “Transylvania Revisited.” In the waning days of President Ion Iliescu’s unsuccessful campaign for re-election in 1996, Huntington’s map was used from the other side, as it were, to suggest that the unity of the country would be endangered by the election of his rival, who enjoyed substantially greater support in Transylvania (see Molnár, “The Transylvanian Question,” 49).

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oppose more far-reaching forms of autonomy, as in this exchange between two students: Sergiu: I wouldn’t agree with total autonomy. Administrative autonomy, yes, but total, no. Vera: But really it makes no sense, I mean it doesn’t even seem doable. Transylvania as a country, the Republic of Transylvania, or what? That would be total separation. Here autonomy is seen as tantamount to secession, and not only that: for as Sergiu went on to say, “after that Transylvania would unite with Hungary. No way. [This would mean] breaking away from Greater Romania, [but] we’re all Romanians, no, we shouldn’t break away completely.” Political and territorial autonomy were rejected even more categorically in this exchange between Emilia, the retired school teacher we introduced in chapter 5, and her friend Flavia: Emilia: I don’t think there’s a single Romanian, not one Romanian with any sense . . . Flavia: who would even consider [such an idea]. Emilia: And nobody with any sense, or any sensibility—they don’t even have to have Romanian sensibilities—no one could accept this idea, no! Transylvanian Romanians reject it, I’m convinced. Flavia: We agree with administrative autonomy, that money should be given to [local administrators]. Emilia: That’s right! Flavia: So that the money wouldn’t go to Bucharest, but no autonomy like . . . Emilia: Political or territorial . . . Flavia: With a separate Parliament or . . . Emilia: Or leaving [Romania] to unite with others [that is, with another country]. . . . There is no Romanian who’d want that! A Romanian taxi driver who enthusiastically favored administrative autonomy balked at the idea of territorial autonomy for Hungarians: “Oh, no one would agree with that, not me, not you, absolutely no one. That would be favoritism [that is, discrimination against Romanians].” Opponents and supporters of ethnic autonomy sometimes invoke international norms and practices to bolster their case. Romanians sometimes point to the Romanian minority in Hungary to underscore by contrast the already generous array of rights enjoyed by Hungarians in Romania and to undercut the case for autonomy. “It’s a fact that the Hungarians have more rights in Romania than Romanians do in Hun-

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gary,” observed a Romanian history student. “I don’t know what national minority has as many rights as the Hungarians.” Hungarians sometimes invoke the autonomy enjoyed by Basques and Catalans in Spain, Swedes in Finland, or German speakers in Italian South Tyrol. Sometimes autonomy—like other controversial issues—is discussed in a more playful or joking manner. In one Romanian group discussion, a proposal that “Bucures¸teni” should have to get visas to visit Cluj elicited amused approval. In another Romanian group, the secessionist alarm raised by Romanian politicians was jokingly dismissed: “There are eleven million Romanians in Transylvania and nine million Hungarians in Hungary. Figure it out, it [Hungary] would have a Romanian majority [laughter]. You think the Hungarians are going to like that? For me it’d be great!” In a third Romanian group, a twenty-two-year-old truck driver began with a standard line about Hungarian revisionism, but shifted his stance and made a joke of it: Marius: The Hungarians wanna get Transylvania. [pause] Let them have it! //I don’t care, Traian: //But they can’t. Marius: [laughing] as long as they leave the t¸uica˘ [plum brandy] distilleries, you know? [laughter] The rest doesn’t matter. [laughter] Playful or joking remarks aside, stances toward autonomy depend on how the issue is framed. Understood in ethnonational terms, autonomy is seen as dangerous, destabilizing, and unjust by most Romanians, and as axiomatically desirable by most Hungarians. Understood in regional terms, however, and limited to financial and administrative matters, autonomy is something both Romanians and Hungarians can support.

Status Law Lingering around the kitchen table after dinner one evening in the summer of 2001, Mari and her son Zoli got into a heated discussion about the Status Law, which had been adopted by the Hungarian parliament earlier that summer and was slated to take effect in January. The Status Law was adopted by Hungary to create a formal legal status (hence the name) for transborder Hungarians satisfying certain criteria; those possessing this status would be entitled to certain benefits, both at home (financial support for families with children in Hungarian schools) and in Hungary (including discounts on transportation and the opportunity to

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work there three months per year).25 Mari appreciated the initiative, while Zoli criticized it as an empty gesture: Mari: But now at least we’ll get some help, I don’t know what it will involve exactly, it’s only two pages in the newspaper and I didn’t have time to read it, it’s just what I heard on the TV. Any help is welcome, any help but, you //see— Zoli: //It’s minimal help. Mari: It doesn’t matter, however much it is. Zoli: But when it’s so little that it doesn’t even matter anymore . . . Mari: But it does matter to me [ . . . ] [...] Mari: No matter how you look at it, it would be nice to get some sort of help. [ . . . ] So many years have gone by without Hungarians in Transylvania getting any help, and now, finally, it seems that there’s enough good will. [ . . . ] Why shouldn’t we get some help? Who’s it going to hurt? [...] Zoli: All of this is just stupid. [ . . . ] It’s ridiculous [ . . . ] You know what it’s like? They give you a little piece of shit and you complain so you get some more shit, “Gimme some shit!,” but no one cares about that shit. [ . . . ] No one’s even talking about [ . . . ] whether it’s shit or not, or what it is that they’re getting. [...] Mari: This isn’t necessarily //about— Zoli: //Then why do you care? Mari: about what we get, //it’s— Zoli: //Then what is it about? [laughs ironically] Mari: About the principle of it, it’s the principle that Hungary finally wants to help the Hungarians in the neighboring countries in some way. Zoli: But there’s nothing for them to do! Mari: Of course there is. [ . . . ] Are we really that well off? Zoli: Marika, you can’t help someone if you don’t do anything for them. Mari: Well, they want to do something. Zoli: But they’re not, they’re not doing anything, they threw a piece of shit up into the air and everybody wants it. [laughing ironically] 25 In the course of subsequent bilateral negotiations, the work provision was extended to apply to all Romanian citizens, and other changes were made as well. On the Status Law, see in English Kántor et al., eds., The Hungarian Status Law; Stewart, “The Hungarian Status Law.”

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Mari: I already said it’s not about that, about what you’re going to get, it’s about the principle. Zoli: You’re doing the exact same thing. Mari: It’s the principle. [...] Zoli: All I’m saying is that I’m not going to get anything out of any of this, and you’re not going to get anything either, just the principle, you’re fighting for the principle, Marika. Mari: And that’s already something. Zoli: [ . . . ] You worked for 39 years, so you should get something, it doesn’t matter what, but something at least. The Hungarians aren’t giving you anything, the Romanians try hard to keep you from getting anything. That’s it. The principle. Every damn thing is a principle. I’m going to fight for something when it’s tangible [ . . . ] but as long as some Hungarian tells me, “You just keep fighting, because eventually I’ll get around to giving you something,” then the Hungarian can go to hell, you understand? [...] Mari: It’s a matter of good will, too—that’s nice isn’t it? Zoli: [ . . . ] They’re good-willed, very kind [ironically] [ . . . ] but none of that means shit. Many Cluj Hungarians, especially among the older generation, shared the moral and symbolic concerns articulated by Mari. Like Mari, they emphasized the principle, the gesture, the long-overdue recognition from Hungary. Like earlier generations of Transylvanian Hungarians who had been forcibly separated from Hungary by the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon, today’s older generation had experienced the brief period of national reunification during World War II, only to be cut off again from Hungary by the postwar settlement (and later by the harsh measures of the Ceaus¸escu regime). Understanding themselves as victims of geopolitical forces beyond their control, they thought it only right that Hungary had finally acknowledged its special responsibility for them. Károly, the theater stagehand, argued that the Status Law was fundamentally a moral question; he invoked the experience of his parents and grandparents, who had lost their Hungarian citizenship involuntarily. Romanians talked less about the Status Law than Hungarians. But thanks to the strong criticisms of the law made by the Romanian government, which had been prominently covered in the local and national media, most Romanians were well aware of the law, if a bit hazy about its specific provisions. They, too, appealed to principle—though to very different principles. As Emilia put it,

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It’s not right [ . . . ] that you come from your country and make demands on citizens of another country. [ . . . ] It’s unacceptable. It’s one thing to take an interest in your coethnics who live in another country, to want them to preserve their language, culture [ . . . ] whatever, I totally agree. But to come and draw distinctions between your people and the others in another country? Do it at home, that’s your problem. They’re your laws, your problems. But to meddle in another country like that? [ . . . ] So now a Hungarian can come and thumb his nose at me [and say], “I can pound my chest now because I have such-and-such and if I go to Hungary I have such-and-such advantages? [ . . . ] And then you expect someone like that to be a loyal citizen? But talk was not just about matters of principle. Unlike autonomy, the Status Law (as it was initially proposed and enacted) would directly affect individuals, creating an official status for which one could apply and to which certain individual benefits were attached. Some, like Zoli, derided the benefits. Others saw them as more substantial, and talked about how the status could be obtained, and who would qualify. Romanians, too, reflected on this question; some found themselves musing— ironically, jokingly, or even seriously—about how they themselves or others with partial, uncertain, or vestigial Hungarian roots might qualify. Since the Status Law attached certain benefits to the official “status” of being a (transborder) Hungarian, it raised the question of who could, who would, and who should acquire this status. It raised the question, in short, of who was Hungarian—and who might claim to be so. Many felt the Status Law would encourage people who were not “really” Hungarian to claim to be Hungarian. Some saw this as amusing, others, as objectionable. Consider the following lively excerpt from a Hungarian group discussion. Imre: [handyman] What’s the basis for getting //the . . . Nándor: [set designer] //If you consider yourself //Hungarian. Imre: // Hungarian papers. Okay, fine, but it’s not like I can call myself Hungarian and then all of a sudden I want to call myself Japanese. I don’t have slanted eyes, so it shouldn’t just work on the basis of what you call //yourself [laughs] Jancsi: [skilled worker] //No, the thing is you have to know the language on a certain level. Imre: Fine, and so maybe I learn Japanese [laughs] but that won’t make me Japanese either. [ . . . ] I don’t know who’s going to be in charge of deciding who’s Hungarian //and then— Nándor: //the DAHR.

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Imre: The way I see it the church ought to do this since nationality— in general it’s the church— I think, since you were christened, because, for example, in Romania Protes//tants— Nándor: //I actually wasn’t christened. Jancsi: So it’s still going to be decided on the basis of how you identify yourself because look, Eminescu [Romania’s great national poet] wasn’t Romanian even though he considered himself Romanian, Peto´´fi [Hungary’s great national poet] wasn’t Hungarian even though he considered himself Hungarian. Imre: Fine, but I still can’t call myself Cameroonian even if I want to. Jancsi: Whatever you call yourself, however you feel, if that’s what you want be, then that’s what you are. Imre: But you can’t do it like that because, how should I put it, behind all that you have these interests, “So what can I get out of this?” [...] Imre: [ . . . ] I can say I’m Kenyan. Ádám: [sound technician] And then that’s what you are, that’s what you are. Jancsi: If that’s what you want to call yourself, my God . . . Ádám: Then that’s what you are. Earlier in the same discussion, Károly speculated how mixed marriages would complicate the issue: There are lots of mixed marriages where automatically— if either husband or wife identifies as Hungarian [ . . . ] then right away all the other members of the family, the wife [or the husband], and the children, too, will get the Hungarian certificate. [ . . . ] And so what will happen? Since there are 23 million Romanians in Romania, or rather 23 million citizens, it’s going to turn out that 20 [million] are Hungarian [laughter from Ádám, who is married to a Romanian] and 3 million are Bulgarians or whatever [Ádám laughs again], that’s where the problem is with this whole thing. Because there’s a ton of mixed marriages and so naturally, I mean it’s human nature, right, that if I have the smallest chance of getting something . . . But a middle-aged taxi driver of mixed Romanian-Hungarian background (who for the most part identified as Romanian) felt that both he and his children (who barely spoke Hungarian) were entitled to reap the benefits the law had to offer. “I’m not going to abuse it, I’m going to use it in the sense that I’m half-Hungarian, and so I’m going to get the Hun-

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garian identity papers. [ . . . ] Maybe it seems like a bit much, but why shouldn’t my kids take advantage of my identity papers if they want to study in Budapest? [ . . . ] I’ll have an advantage, through these identity papers.” In this way the law invited speculation not only on what it meant to be Hungarian (or Romanian, for that matter), but on how flexible such notions were. Most Clujeni ordinarily understood ethnic and national identity as natural and enduring, not as negotiable, fluid, contested, and constructed. They were everyday primordialists, not postmodern constructivists. Yet the Status Law, by inviting them to reflect on what they ordinarily took for granted, brought out a more constructivist strand in the local folk sociology of ethnicity and nationality.26 The Status Law offered rich material for talking politics, and such talk made ethnicity and nationality momentarily salient in everyday conversation. Instead of being taken for granted and unarticulated, the question of who is what, linked by the Status Law to the question of who gets what, was brought into focus and self-consciously addressed. Not everyone, to be sure, was prompted by the Status Law controversy to think about such matters. To a fair number of Clujeni, the debate over the Status Law appeared remote, abstract, and uninteresting. As another Romanian taxi driver put it, “It’s just a political game. [ . . . ] Nobody cares, ordinary people don’t care about this stuff.” Yet even this taxi driver, despite his protestations of indifference, had his own take on the matter: “Look, [the law should apply] either to all citizens of Romania or. . . . Not things like, ‘I’m Romanian, the others are . . .’ That’s discrimination and it’s not right.” More than most political debates, the Status Law controversy allowed Clujeni to connect their everyday experience of ethnicity to the larger themes of nationalist politics. 26 On everyday primordialism, see Gil-White, “How Thick Is Blood?” and Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition”; on the folk sociology of ethnicity, see Hirschfeld, Race in the Making.


CONCLUSION

THIS BOOK WAS CONCEIVED as a theoretically informed case study, and as an empirically grounded analysis of how ethnicity works. We have not attempted to construct an overarching theory; we have sought rather to change the terms of a conversation.1 Scholarly discussions of ethnicity— and a fortiori public discussions—tend to take bounded groups for granted as basic constituents of the social world and fundamental units of social analysis. Even ostensibly constructivist analyses routinely resort to “groupist” language. We have sought to develop ways of analyzing ethnicity without invoking the language of bounded groups, and to demonstrate their fruitfulness even in a setting in which ethnicity is deeply rooted and intensely politicized. We have provided accounts of the symbolic strategies used to claim national “ownership” of public space; the ways in which ethnicity and nationhood work in and through categories, formal and informal; the sociolinguistic practices through which ethnicity is enacted in interaction; the profound asymmetries—political, institutional, demographic, sociolinguistic, cognitive, and interactional—that structure the ways ethnicity is experienced by majorities and minorities; the ways in which prevailing relationships between marked and unmarked categories are reversed within the institutionalized world of the minority; the processes through which that world is largely reproduced over time, yet eroded at the margins; the processes and practices through which nominally mixed interethnic relationships come (intermittently) to be experienced as mixed; and the ways in which national or ethnic self-understandings are challenged, and in some cases transformed, by the crossing of international frontiers. The details of these accounts are grounded in the particulars of our case; but the main lines of the analysis are applicable in a wide range of other settings. So while our study was conducted in Cluj, it is not simply a study of Cluj; it is a study of the everyday workings of ethnicity in a 1 The great range and heterogeneous causal texture of the phenomena grouped under the rubrics of ethnicity and nationalism, emphasized already by Max Weber, render problematic any effort to construct a general theory. As Weber remarked at the end of his characteristically acute discussion of ethnicity, a precise and differentiated analysis would “surely throw out the umbrella term ‘ethnic’ altogether,” for it is “entirely unusable” for any “truly rigorous investigation.” Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 313; cf. Economy and Society, 394–95.

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setting marked by sustained and highly charged ethnopolitical conflict, on the one hand, yet by traditions and expectations of civility, on the other. Our diverse accounts of the workings of ethnicity are informed by a common underlying perspective. In this perspective, ethnicity is not a thing, an attribute, or a distinct sphere of life; it is a way of understanding and interpreting experience, a way of talking and acting, a way of formulating interests and identities. Nationhood, similarly, is not an ethnocultural fact; it is a frame of vision, a cultural idiom, and a political claim. Understood in this way, ethnicity and nationhood exist in a wide range of forms. They are expressed in ethnopolitical claims, objectified in symbols, embedded in institutional structures and organizational routines, encoded in elite and popular discourse, embodied in schemas and commonsense knowledge, and enacted in public ceremonies and private interactions. This itemization is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but it does suggest the range of forms and practices through which ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced. Reviewing these here may help pull together some of the strands of the analysis. When expressed in political claims or objectified in symbols, ethnicity is easy to see; from afar, it may even be too easy to see. Funar’s antiHungarian rhetoric, for example, was strikingly evident from a distance. His pronouncements were recorded, reproduced, circulated, and preserved; they were conveniently accessible, searchable, and retrievable. Yet as we have argued, to focus on Funar’s incendiary rhetoric, or on Hungarian counterclaims, without attending to the question of resonance or receptivity (what Katherine Verdery has called the “is-anyone-listening?” question), might lead one to believe that “the Romanians” and “the Hungarians” were locked in a tense and potentially violent struggle in Cluj.2 Ethnicity and nationhood are also readily visible when objectified in flags, plaques, monuments, and the like. In this respect, too, Cluj under Funar serves as a textbook case. The deployment of thousands of Romanian flags, and the painting of benches, sidewalk posts, and even streetside trash receptacles in the Romanian national colors was intended as a public affirmation of the Romanianness of Cluj. Yet while the national colors were at first conspicuously visible, they gradually faded into the background. Like the monuments described by Robert Musil—and like many of Funar’s other symbolic gestures and provocations—they became “attention-proof.” From afar, it was easy to see the flags, yet much harder to see how the flags were seen, or not seen, by ordinary Clujeni. We do not wish to minimize the significance of Funar’s politics of symbolic nationalization or of his hyperbolic rhetoric; but we have sought to keep them in perspective. 2

Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, 6.

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Less striking from afar, but richly explored in recent years, are the ways in which ethnicity and nationhood are institutionalized and embedded in organizational routines. Institutionalist and organizational perspectives on ethnicity have focused on the state, analyzing the ways in which states count, categorize, and identify their populations through censuses, identification cards, passports and the like; the manner in which states are constituted, expressly or implicitly, as nation-states (or, in a few cases, as multinational states); and the forms of state recognition—or nonrecognition—of ethnic heterogeneity. We have given more sustained attention to another, less fully explored mode of institutionalization, through which a Hungarian “world” has been created in Cluj, founded on an interlocking web of institutions and on the personal networks that take shape within them. These institutions, paradoxically, reduce the experiential salience of ethnicity, even as they structure social relations along ethnic lines. Ethnicity is in general more salient for Hungarians than for Romanians; yet the Hungarian world possesses a scaled-down version of the power that Romanian and other nation-states have to “unmark” ethnicity and nationality and to confer on the ethnonational majority the privilege of invisibility. Discourse has become another rich terrain for the study of ethnicity and nationhood, though one that is deeply fissured along theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological fault lines. Most discourse-analytic work on ethnicity has examined the discourse of cultural and political elites, shading over into the ethnopolitical claims-making discussed above. Drawing on microinteractionist and conversation-analytic forms of discourse analysis, we have focused instead on the everyday talk of ordinary citizens as a key—yet relatively unexplored—site for the daily reproduction and enactment of ethnicity. Ethnicity is a profoundly embodied phenomenon. Compared to many other settings, bodily cues to ethnic identity play a relatively minor role in Cluj (notwithstanding the claim of some Clujeni to be able to “tell” ethnicity on sight). But ethnicity is embodied in more ways than meet the eye. It is embodied in the engrained dispositions and schemas of the habitus, and in the feelings of ease and unease, attraction and repugnance, that color relations to language and to other ethnicized or ethnicizable aspects of culture. The contrast between the ease and comfort felt when speaking Hungarian and the more or less pronounced unease or discomfort often felt when speaking Romanian is central, for example, to the experience of ethnicity for many Cluj Hungarians. Ethnicity and nationhood, finally, are performed and enacted in a variety of ways, public and private. They are performed in public demonstrations, holiday celebrations, commemorations, pilgrimages, and rituals such as the singing of the national anthem; and they are enacted in

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ordinary private interaction. We have analyzed both public performances and private enactments, but we have focused on the latter, examining the less well-explored ways in which ethnicity is enacted in everyday interaction through linguistic and other cues to ethnic identity, category work of various sorts, sociolinguistic practices, joking and teasing, avoidance of “sensitive” subjects, and the occasional “overcommunication” or “undercommunication” of ethnicity. The first part of our study focused on conspicuously visible (and audible) forms of ethnicity and nationalism. We drew on the discourse and demands of those who claim to speak and act in the name of the “nation”: politicians, journalists, publicists, clergy, schoolteachers, and others, almost invariably members of political or cultural elites. Our data were drawn from the public record, and were easily legible from above and from afar: legislation, party and movement programs, political claims, elite discourse, demonstrations, speeches, statements, press reports, textbooks, and public artifacts such as flags, plaques, and statues. Part Two addressed less conspicuous everyday forms of ethnicity. Our data— generated by the addressees, not the authors of nationalist politics—were drawn from people who ordinarily leave no traces in the public record: they make no speeches, issue no statements, write no articles. By observing, recording and analyzing everyday interaction, we sought to grasp ethnicity in practice, as it is embodied, enacted, and experienced by ordinary Clujeni. Ethnicity and nationalism exist not only in a wide range of forms, but also in multiple temporal registers. We have studied them in the slow unfolding of developmental time, in the contingent happenings of eventful time, in the lived experience of biographical and everyday time, and in the moment-to-moment contingencies of interactional time.3 In doing so, we have employed analytical idioms seldom brought together: historical, political, ethnographic, and interactionist. Our opening chapters employed developmental perspectives. We traced the gradual diffusion of “nation” as a frame of political and cultural vision, adopted first by educated elites yet increasingly, by the turn of the twentieth century, by ordinary people as well. We charted the restructuring of political space in East Central Europe, in the course of which nation-states—based in principle on the convergence of political and cultural boundaries—succeeded multinational empires as the dominant political form. We analyzed the politicization of culture and the culturalization of politics. We showed how these processes, common to the 3 On temporal registers, see Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales”; and for a very different perspective, Sewell, “Three Temporalities.”

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entire region, played out in Transylvania and in Cluj. We sketched the nationalization of political and cultural space that resulted from successive—and increasingly successful—attempts to press the historically multiethnic and polyreligious province of Transylvania into the homogenizing embrace of the modern nation-state. And we traced the seemingly inexorable Romanianization of Cluj over the course of the twentieth century. While developmentalist accounts abstract from events or treat them as nodes in developmental sequences, “eventful” accounts highlight the causal significance of contingent events.4 Some events are momentous and transformative.5 In the historiography of nationalism, the French Revolution is often seen as such an event, in which expressly nationalist political claims were first formulated in a recognizably modern idiom. For our purposes, transformative events are those that fundamentally recast nationalist politics in Cluj (and in Transylvania): the Revolution of 1848; the changes in sovereignty in 1867, 1918–20, 1940, and 1944–45; the communist takeover of 1944–48; the revolutionary upheaval of December 1989; and the violence in Taˆrgu-Mures¸ in 1990. We also examined smaller-scale events that made ethnicity and nationness at least momentarily salient for many Clujeni, including the merger of Hungarian and Romanian universities in Cluj in 1959; the various nationalizing initiatives of Mayor Funar and the few substantial protests they provoked; a much-hyped soccer match between Romania and Hungary; and the struggles over the 2002 census. In addition to these “public” temporalities, we have studied ethnicity in “private” temporal registers. Biographical time and everyday time intersect with eventful time, but move to rhythms of their own. Some events—such as the changes of sovereignty, the fall of Ceaus¸escu, or the violence in Taˆrgu-Mures¸—powerfully shape the experience of all who are caught up in them; others—such as the theft of the Hungarian flag from the Consulate or most other ethnopolitical events that defined the tenure of Mayor Funar—preoccupy the political class but leave ordinary people largely uninvolved. Biographical trajectories and the rhythms of everyday life shape the experience of ethnicity more powerfully than do most political events. When Zsolt moved from his overwhelmingly Hun4 On “eventful” temporality, see Sewell, “Three Temporalities.” Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 19–21 argued for eventful analyses of nationhood and nationalism to complement the large and mature developmentalist literature. 5 For Sewell, events as a category of historical analysis are by definition transformative: events are defined as “that relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transform structures” (“Three Temporalities,” 262). Our understanding of events is broader, embracing not only transformative events, but also more “ordinary” events, and embracing events on all time scales, from the epochal events of macrohistorical time to the evanescent events of interactional time.

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garian home town in the Szekler region to study computer science (in Romanian) at the Technical University in Cluj, for example, ethnicity became much more salient to him; he became acutely conscious of being Hungarian, and of speaking Romanian poorly, in a way that he never was before. For others, entering into a mixed marriage (as do about 25 percent of all Hungarians, though a much smaller percentage of Romanians) changes the experience of ethnicity. And for most Hungarians, the daily movements between the Hungarian world and the wider world, and the corresponding shifts between speaking Hungarian and speaking Romanian, frame the quotidian experience of ethnicity. On a more finely calibrated temporal scale, ethnicity “happens” in the moment-to-moment unfolding of interaction.6 It happens, for example, when people become aware—often through language spoken, accent, or name—of the ethnicity of a stranger, and when that awareness affects the course of interaction. It happens when ethnicity is invoked to account for an action or stance, to hold others accountable as Hungarians or Romanians, to claim insider status, or to police category membership. And it happens when nominally interethnic relationships among friends, neighbors, colleagues, or spouses come to be experienced as interethnic at particular moments. The interactional processes and dynamics that make ethnicity salient at one moment but not at the next are largely independent of the rhythms and dynamics of historical change, ethnopolitical contention, biographical trajectories, and even daily routines. We were led to study ethnicity in these very different temporal registers—with their characteristically differing causal textures—by our interest in treating together aspects of ethnicity and nationalism ordinarily discussed separately. Historical and political perspectives have helped contextualize our ethnographic and microinteractionist analyses. Conversely, our ethnographic and interactionist perspectives on everyday ethnicity have informed our historical and political analyses, helping to explain the muted popular response to nationalist politics and, in a longer-term developmental perspective, the gradual erosion of the Hungarian world. Over the course of the last two centuries, ethnic and national categories have been articulated, diffused, politicized, institutionalized, and internalized throughout the world. They exist in the many social forms and temporal registers we have identified, and one could no doubt identify others. But they are neither ubiquitous nor omnirelevant; and where they are present, they are not always salient or operative. In Cluj, these 6 For a sustained analysis of one such “happening,” see appendix A, “An Example of the Interactional Emergence of Nationalism.”

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recurrently politicized, multiply institutionalized, and durably internalized categories are not consistently used to code differences, articulate grievances, or interpret experience; they are only intermittently salient in everyday life. Salience is not the only measure of significance; what is unmarked and unremarked is not necessarily unimportant. Our own analysis of the Hungarian world underscored this point: the power of that world, like that of the nation-state, lies precisely in its ability to unmark ethnicity, to make it invisible. And as Michael Billig suggested in his illuminating discussion of “banal nationalism,” emblems and indices of nationhood need not be conspicuous—or even noticed at all—to serve as background reminders of “the nation.”7 Even if largely unheeded by Clujeni, the national symbols that saturated public space and the nationalist rhetoric that saturated public discourse under Funar may have contributed in this way to the reproduction of nationhood. Yet one should not assume, as Billig does, that nationhood is always being reproduced as a pervasively relevant social category, or that banal nationalism ultimately reinforces nationalist politics. Our study has highlighted the disjuncture between the thematization of ethnicity and nationhood in the political realm and their experience and enactment in everyday life. And even as we have focused analytically on ethnicity and nationness, and have sought to analyze how they work in a variety of forms, public and private, we have tried to remain sensitive to their limits. Scholarly analysis and public discussion alike tend to emphasize the power of ethnic identities and the passions mobilized by ethnonationalist politics. Passions can indeed be mobilized—but not always, easily, or automatically. Ethnic identifications and self-understandings can indeed be powerful—but they are not always so, not even in situations of intense elite-level ethnopolitical contention. We observed that most Clujeni do not frame their cares and concerns in ethnic terms, and that ethnicity is only intermittently salient. We noted that language is most often not a vehicle for ethnicity but simply a means of communicating. We observed that the Hungarian “world” makes ethnicity less rather than more salient. We found that much nominally interethnic interaction is not experientially interethnic. These and other findings provide a corrective to overethnicized interpretations of culture, society, and politics; and they help explain the limited reach and resonance of nationalist politics. In the end, though, our argument is not about how much or how little ethnicity matters; it is about how ethnicity works. Here the study of 7 See for example Billig’s analysis of “homeland deixis” in political rhetoric and journalism, focused on the ways in which pronouns like “we” and “here” implicitly invoke national frames of reference (Billig, Banal Nationalism, 105–9; see also ibid., chapter 5 on the daily “flagging” of the homeland and pp. 8, 127, and 177 on the reproduction of nationhood).

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everyday experience is fundamental. Outside of anthropology, the terrain of the everyday remains underexplored in the literature on ethnicity and nationalism. Yet it is ultimately in and through everyday experience—as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation—that ethnicity and nationhood are invested with meaning and produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.


EPILOGUE

THE TWELVE-YEAR TENURE of Mayor Gheorghe Funar came to an end in June 2004. Funar finished a distant third in the first round of local elections, winning just 22 percent of the vote; Emil Boc, representing an alliance of the National Liberal Party and Democratic Party, succeeded Funar as mayor. Boc made conciliatory overtures to the town’s Hungarian residents, and he began to undo many of Funar’s initiatives.1 The tricolor trash bins were replaced, the benches repainted a dark shade of red (“English red,” as one newspaper informed its readers). The tricolor posts that lined sidewalks were repainted red as well, and the formerly ubiquitous Romanian flags now decorate only public institutions and major squares. The billboards reminding Clujeni that the country’s official language is Romanian were taken down. In the main square, the focal point of Funar’s nationalizing initiatives, the tricolor pennants behind the statue of King Matthias were removed, as was the stone marking the spot where a replica of Trajan’s Column was to be erected. As for the archaeological excavations, one pit was filled in and covered with flowerbeds; the other, at this writing, is slated to be largely filled in as well, though part will be dedicated to displaying the ruins of a Roman house and courtyard. The change in the cityscape and in the tone and substance of local politics entailed no equally striking change in everyday ethnicity. Of course Hungarians, and many Romanians, too, were relieved by Funar’s defeat; some were openly elated. For most Clujeni, however, and even for most Hungarians, the everyday experience of ethnicity had been largely independent of what Funar said and did as mayor (at least during his second and third terms, when Clujeni had grown inured to his provocations). With Funar out of the picture, Clujeni no longer have the mayor’s outrageous statements or flamboyant gestures to complain or joke about; and Hungarians no longer have Funar as an explicit or (more often) implicit anchor of local ethnic solidarity. But Funar’s departure is unlikely to change substantially the asymmetries in the Romanian and Hungarian experience of ethnicity, the dynamics governing the workings of ethnic categories, the intermittent enactment of ethnicity in nominally mixed relationships, the 1

See Szabadság, July 6 and 13, 2004.

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muted experience of ethnicity within the Hungarian world, the occasional ethnic frictions associated with language choice, or other aspects of the everyday experience of ethnicity. Yet while everyday ethnicity does not closely track short-term local fluctuations in nationalist politics, it is not static or unchanging. The everyday experience of ethnicity in Cluj has been profoundly transformed over the course of the last century in response to longer-term, larger-scale social and political developments, including changes in sovereignty and the institutional reorganizations they entailed, the imposition and collapse of communism, massive migration from the countryside, and the opening up of the country after Ceaus¸escu. We return in closing to another long-term process with far-reaching implications for the everyday experience of ethnicity: the process of nationalization that we analyzed in our first three chapters. The question of nationalization, and the correlative question of ethnic reproduction, were brought to the fore by the 2002 census, which recorded sharp declines in the Hungarian population of Cluj and other Transylvanian towns, on top of the substantial declines registered in the preceding census.2 Although the magnitude of the decline came as a shock to Transylvanian Hungarian public opinion, this was simply the latest stage in an ongoing process of nationalization that began nearly a century ago.3 A continued decline would erode the institutional foundations of the Hungarian world, impacting schools, churches, newspapers, theaters, and enterprises. Some Hungarian schools already report difficulties filling their allotted classes; and far more people have been buried than baptized by Hungarian churches in recent years.4 As we have seen, the changing ethnic demography of Cluj and other Transylvanian towns is part of a broader “nationalization of the cities” characteristic of East Central Europe as a whole. For centuries, town 2 The last two censuses recorded a 30 percent decline in the Hungarian population of Cluj, from 86,000 in 1977 to 60,000 in 2002. For the political struggles over the census in Cluj, see chapter 4, pp. 151–59. 3 The population of Cluj, 83 percent Hungarian-speaking in 1910, is now 80 percent Romanian, while the urban population of Transylvania as a whole—65 percent Hungarian-speaking, 15 percent German-speaking, and just 18 percent Romanian-speaking in 1910—is also now 80 percent Romanian. (The Hungarian-speaking population in 1910 included a substantial number of Jews, perhaps 15 percent of all Hungarian-speakers.) See tables 2.1 and 3.1, pp. 86 and 93. 4 The six Catholic churches in Cluj recorded three times as many burials as baptisms between 1998 and 2002; and the ratio of burials to baptisms in the Calvinist churches doubled from 1.3 between 1983 and 1988 to 2.6 between 1993 and 2002. (Data were obtained from the Archdeaconry of the Catholic Church, and from the Bishop’s Office of the Calvinist Church, courtesy of Mihály Szabó.) Conditions for sustaining a vibrant Hungarian presence are still less favorable in other towns outside the majority-Hungarian Szekler region. The secondary schools and expansive opportunities for Hungarian-language university-level education in Cluj attract students from elsewhere in Transylvania, and some of these end up settling in town; this offsets to some extent the losses through emigration to Hungary.

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dwellers and peasants in the surrounding countryside had spoken different languages, lived under different legal regimes, and often practiced different religions. Beginning in the nineteenth century in some areas, and in the early twentieth century in others (including Cluj), this pattern began slowly but inexorably to change. Social mobilization, infrastructural improvements, universal schooling, and urban commercial and industrial development—accelerated, in Cluj and other Transylvanian towns, by state-sponsored heavy industrialization under communism— engendered large-scale migration to the towns. Instead of assimilating migrants from the countryside, as had traditionally been the case, towns now began to be assimilated by the countryside.5 The replacement of multinational empires by nationalizing successor states after World War I worked in the same direction. Schools and other urban institutions were now backed by the powers of the nationalizing state, and nationalist intellectuals articulated programs for conquering ethnically “alien” cities and nationalizing the urban economy. The Jewish presence in most East Central European cities was destroyed by the Holocaust, the German presence by postwar expulsions and later migrations; but both were already under substantial pressure before the war. Today, with some exceptions, the ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious composition of cities and towns does not differ strikingly from that of the countryside; the conquest of the “alien” towns by the “national” countryside has been completed. Theorists of transnationalism, postnationalism, and globalization have argued that such nationalization is a thing of the past. They see the nation-state as buffeted by the unprecedented and uncontrollable circulation of people, goods, images, ideas, and cultural products, and as having progressively lost its ability to govern social, economic, cultural, and political life. The nation-state, on this view, can no longer control its borders, regulate its economy, shape its culture, or homogenize its population. The decline of the homogenizing, nationalizing, assimilationist nation-state is said to have redefined the relationship between territory 5 Historically, towns were inhabited by German-speakers, by Jews speaking German, Yiddish, and other languages, and in some regions by speakers of Hungarian, Greek, and Italian. Budapest, Prague, and Bratislava, for example, were predominantly German-speaking towns in the first half of the nineteenth century, as were many other towns throughout the region. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews formed large minorities, and in numerous smaller towns majorities, of the urban population; they comprised nearly a third of the population of Warsaw, and nearly a quarter of that of Budapest. On the distinctiveness of urban development in East Central Europe, see Armstrong, “Toward a Framework for Considering Nationalism in East Europe,” 289–94; Deák, “Assimilation and Nationalism,” 9ff.; Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 37–41, 97, 109; Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 24; and Szarka, “A városi magyar népesség.” For a more general analysis, situating the phenomenon in the context of a broad treatment of modernization and social mobilization, see Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, chapter 6.

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and culture; this has enabled immigrant and diaspora populations to sustain ethnic identities over time and across space.6 If territorially dispersed migrant populations and their descendants can preserve their identities in this putatively postnational world, it ought to be much easier for historically rooted, territorially concentrated minorities like Transylvanian Hungarians to do so, especially when supported by an elaborate network of institutions like those that we have described. In Cluj and elsewhere, this network of institutions has been substantially extended and strengthened since the fall of Ceaus¸escu. Nationalizing policies under Ceaus¸escu had restricted Hungarian-language schooling, especially at the high school and university levels; state policies have since become much more supportive of minority-language education (and of minority rights in general). With the opening up of what had been a notoriously closed state, moreover, Transylvanian Hungarians could now easily maintain ties with friends and relatives in Hungary, work and study in Hungary, watch Hungarian television, receive subsidies from Hungary for Hungarian cultural activities, and even benefit from a form of extraterritorial quasi-citizenship introduced by Hungary’s Status Law. The position of national minorities and state-spanning ethnocultural nations, moreover, would seem to have been strengthened by European integration. The prospect of European Union membership has provided leverage for the institutionalization of minority rights throughout East Central Europe. And the eastward enlargement of the EU has been welcomed by nationally minded Hungarians; by attenuating or “virtualizing” the borders separating Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania (and perhaps eventually those in Serbia and Ukraine as well) from Hungary, European integration is seen as creating a space within which the Hungarian ethnocultural nation, torn apart after World War I, can be socially, culturally, and economically—if not politically—reunified.7 All of these factors ought to favor ethnic reproduction and work against further nationalization. Yet ethnic reproduction is anything but assured. This is not because of the nationalizing policies and practices of the Romanian state: the absolute and relative decline in the Hungarian population of Cluj and other Transylvanian towns accelerated after 1989, even as nationalizing pressures weakened and the Hungarian world expanded substantially. The nationalization of Cluj and other 6 See for example Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective”; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant”; Kearney, “Borders and Boundaries of State and Self”; Sheffer, Diaspora Politics. 7 Hungary and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004; Romania is slated to join in 2007. On “virtual” or “trans-sovereign” forms of Hungarian nationalism, see Csergo´´ and Goldgeier, “Nationalist Strategies and European Integration,” 283–38.

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Transylvanian towns since the fall of communism has been driven by the disproportionately heavy emigration of Transylvanian Hungarians, mainly to neighboring Hungary.8 In some settings, emigration is a response to nationalist pressures; it can shade over into forced migration and “ethnic cleansing.” But the emigration of Transylvanian Hungarians has been driven primarily by the accessibility and comparative prosperity of Hungary and by the strength and density of transborder ties.9 It is ironically the international and transnational openness of the Romanian state, not its nationalistic closure, that fosters the ongoing process of nationalization.10 When Romania joins the EU, it will be easier than ever for Transylvanian Hungarians to study, work, and resettle in Hungary. It is therefore possible, especially if the gap in living standards between the two countries remains large, that the reconstitution of the border-spanning 8 Under communism, the nationalization of Cluj and other Transylvanian towns had been driven by immigration: by massive industrialization-related rural-urban migration. But this ended in the mid-1980s. People continue, of course, to move to Cluj, though in smaller numbers than those leaving Cluj for elsewhere in Romania or abroad; but such internal migration to Cluj no longer contributes to national homogenization, since the ethnonational composition of Cluj is now similar to that of Transylvania as a whole; the postcommunist collapse of the heavyindustry sector sharply diminished the attractiveness of Cluj to migrants from outside Transylvania. 9 The migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary has of course been facilitated by shared language, family ties, other social networks, and a sense of identification with Hungary. Yet while identification with Hungary is an important pull factor, nationalist pressures in Romania do not appear to have been a major push factor in post-1989 emigration. Lest one attribute the sharp decline of the Hungarian population of Cluj to the hypernationalist atmosphere created by Mayor Funar, it is worth noting that the decline of the Hungarian population in Cluj between 1992 and 2002 was only slightly above the average for Transylvanian towns. And the decline was even sharper in Oradea, another large Transylvanian town with a proportionately larger Hungarian minority, yet without the extreme nationalism that characterized Cluj during the 1990s; the Hungarian population of Cluj declined by 20 percent from 1992 to 2002, that of Oradea declined by 23 percent. Oradea’s setting just a few miles from the Hungarian border no doubt facilitated both temporary migration to and permanent resettlement in Hungary. Hungarians now comprise only 28 percent of the population of Oradea, down from 52 percent in 1966. See table 4.1, p. 160. 10 Nationalization has continued elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as well, though it has been driven by other processes. The decisive development was the vast reconfiguration of political space through which the multinational Soviet and Yugoslav states and binational Czechoslovakia were replaced by national—and nationalizing—successor states. In the former Yugoslavia, nationalization has resulted from war, forced migration, and the carving up of the formerly extraordinarily heterogeneous Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina into smaller and more ethnonationally homogeneous units. In the Soviet successor states, the large Russian minorities have everywhere been shrinking, most rapidly in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia, but also in Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine. The remnants of the centuries-old German presence in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union disintegrated after 1989 thanks to the conjuncture of free exit and the open door to immigration and citizenship in Germany; the large Jewish population of the former Soviet Union declined precipitously for analogous reasons. In some parts of the region, especially in the westernmost tier of East Central European states (Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary), migration has generated new forms of ethnic heterogeneity; but on the whole, migrations in the region have generated more unmixing than mixing.

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Hungarian ethnocultural nation within the EU, celebrated by many Hungarian nationalists, will accelerate rather than arrest the demographic decline of Transylvanian Hungarians in Cluj and elsewhere. European integration, heralded as transcending the nation-state, would in this case contribute to making the Romanian state more rather than less “national.”11 Celebrants of a postnational and diasporic world see assimilation as a thing of the past. And it is certainly true that, after the brutally homogenizing decades of communist rule, new forms of social, economic, and cultural heterogeneity have emerged in Transylvania, as they have elsewhere in the region. Yet despite this diversification and pluralization of cultural practices, consumption patterns, and lifestyles, assimilation has by no means lost its relevance, in Transylvania or elsewhere.12 In Cluj, as we have seen, about a quarter of all Hungarians marry Romanians. On the one hand, this shows a strong pattern of ethnic endogamy: if ethnicity were irrelevant, mixed marriages would be much more prevalent. Yet intermarriage is frequent enough to undermine ethnic reproduction at the margins. Children of mixed marriages are unlikely to attend Hungarian schools or be drawn into the Hungarian world; as a result, most children and grandchildren of mixed marriages come to identify themselves as Romanian.13 Assimilation does not result from direct nationalizing pressures, any more than emigration does.14 The mixed marriages that often lead intergenerationally to assimilation result from the incomplete encapsulation of the Hungarian world, especially from mixed workplaces and a partly mixed university environment. While ethnically homogeneous school-based friendship networks support ethnic endogamy, mixed workplaces (and to some extent universities) work in the opposite direction.15 11 There are of course other scenarios. For nationally minded Hungarians, the loosening of the tie between nation and state within an expanded EU can help strengthen and stabilize the Hungarian minority. Yet this seems unlikely unless living standards in Hungary and Romania converge. So far there has been little evidence of this occurring: between 1998 and 2003, per capita GNP of Hungary, measured in terms of purchasing power standards, has held steady at about twice that of Romania (see http://www.nsi.bg/GDP_e/ECP03_T2.htm). 12 On the increasing recognition that assimilation has not been rendered obsolete, see Brubaker, “The Return of Assimilation?” For a sophisticated treatment of continuing processes of assimilation in the United States, see Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream. On the dynamics of (and limits to) assimilation in nationalizing successor states to the Soviet Union, see Laitin, Identity in Formation. 13 On assimilation in Transylvania, see chapter 9, pp. 298–99, and the demographic analyses cited in chapter 4, p. 159n145. 14 The skewing of school choices within mixed marriages toward Romanian schools does, however, reflect the basic political and linguistic asymmetries that are built into the nation-state, which create a gravitational pull toward education in the state language. 15 Elsewhere in Transylvania, where Hungarian populations are smaller and more scattered, rates of intermarriage and assimilation are higher; in the Szekler region, where the Hungarian world is more fully encapsulated, they are lower.

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The DAHR seeks to counter these processes by strengthening minority rights and building up a more comprehensive Hungarian world. But there is reason to doubt the effectiveness of this strategy. In Finland, for example, often taken as an exemplar of generous minority rights for its Swedish-speaking minority,16 the Swedish minority has declined from nearly 10 percent of the population in 1940 to 5.5 percent in 2003, partly through emigration to Sweden, but mainly through high rates of intermarriage and intergenerational language shift.17 Minority rights have no doubt slowed down this erosion; but they have not been able to arrest it. Apart from seeking to strengthen minority rights, the DAHR seeks to build up a self-sufficient Hungarian world by expanding Hungarianlanguage schools, media, associations, cultural and leisure activities, and workplaces. It is not certain that this strategy of encapsulation will be effective in strengthening the Hungarian presence in Transylvania. The DAHR assumes that a more complete and self-sufficient Hungarian world should reduce migration to Hungary, since it would allow Transylvanian Hungarians to preserve their culture and flourish as Hungarians in Transylvania. But the postcommunist emigration of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary has not been driven by a desire to flourish culturally, or by a desire to escape a repressive nationalizing regime; it has been driven by a desire to flourish economically. Encapsulation within the Hungarian world cuts Transylvanian Hungarians off from the wider Romanian world and connects them more closely to Hungary. This should reduce intermarriage; but it may also foster emigration. Hungarianlanguage university education, for example, qualifies students for work in Hungary (as well as in the small ethnic Hungarian sector in Transylvania), and it may leave them linguistically unqualified for work outside the Hungarian sphere in Transylvania.18 16 Publicly funded Swedish-language day care is available for preschool children, and Swedish-language instruction is provided at all levels, including a separate Swedish-language university. Swedish is an official language alongside Finnish, with constitutional guarantees for equal treatment. The language of local public business is determined by the census: where at least 3,000 persons or 8 percent of the population are native speakers of one language, then that language is used. This rule applies symmetrically to Swedish and Finnish. As a result, Swedish is the sole language of public administration in about 5 percent of the country’s municipalities, while Swedish is used alongside Finnish in another 9 percent of municipalities. See, for example, Solsten and Meditz, eds., Finland, 96–101; Laponce, Languages and their Territories, 183–84; Østern, “The Swedish Language in Education in Finland”; Jungner, “Swedish in Finland.” 17 Since most are fluently bilingual, Swedish-speaking Finns can easily “cross from one language group to another. However highly they valued their mother tongue and their group’s cultural identity, they were not bound by them when selecting friends or spouses” (Solsten and Meditz, Finland), 101. 18 See Kiss and Csata, “Migrációs-potenciál vizsgálatok Erdélyben,” 117–18. The DAHR also seeks territorial autonomy for the Szekler region of eastern Transylvania, where Hungarians comprise a substantial majority of the population. Territorial autonomy would no doubt facilitate ethnic reproduction by establishing a “political roof” or protective “shell” for Hungarian

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The literature on minority rights has given sustained attention to the public policies and legal frameworks involved in nationalization and ethnic reproduction.19 It has given much less attention to social processes such as the dynamics of migration, of intermarriage, and of language use, school choice, and ethnonational identification in mixed families. By casting national minorities as unitary actors, the political theory and public policy literatures obscure the ways in which private action can subvert public goods.20 Similarly, by focusing on the desire of “the Hungarians” to preserve their language and culture, the prevailing discourse of Transylvanian Hungarian elites obscures the ways in which what particular Hungarians want may lead in very different directions, notably toward emigration or, via intermarriage, toward assimilation (without any conscious intention to assimilate). The Hungarians who emigrate or marry Romanians may care just as much as others, abstractly, about preserving Hungarian culture in Transylvania; but this abstract concern has little bearing on decisions about marriage, migration, or school choice for children in mixed families. Nation-states have never been fully closed, self-reproducing “power containers”;21 they are even less so today than a half-century or a century ago. Nationalists everywhere worry about the encroachment of the English language and other potentially denationalizing forces. Yet even in their weakened, more open condition, nation-states (and autonomous territorial polities like Quebec or Catalonia) routinely succeed in reproducing national languages and cultures through state educational systems and other means. This holds not only for large nation-states, but even for diminutive states like Estonia, where there are fewer speakers of the national language than there are Hungarians in Transylvania. Can minority populations do the same? In the short run, or even over the medium term, they can. The interlocking institutions of the Hungarian language and culture in Transylvania (see for example Laponce, Languages and Their Territories). But territorial autonomy would be relevant only to Hungarians who live in the Szekler region (about a third of Transylvanian Hungarians). And there is almost no chance of the Romanian state agreeing to it. Territorial autonomy is not mandated by any international agreement, and there is strong resistance to the idea, not least because it evokes the specter of Hungarian revisionism. Resistance to territorial autonomy is not distinctive to Romania: territorial autonomy has been established elsewhere in East Central Europe almost exclusively through military conflict, not through negotiated devolution. See Kymlicka, “Reply and Conclusion,” 361–82, which contrasts the growing acceptance of territorial autonomy in the West with continued fierce resistance to it in East Central Europe. 19 The influential work of Kymlicka, for example, highlights the “dialectic of nation-building and minority rights.” This directs attention to expressly or implicitly nationalizing policies and practices, on the one hand, and to minority ethnopolitical claims and institutionalized minority rights, on the other. See, for example, “Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe,” 21ff. 20 We borrow this formulation from David Laitin; see “The Tower of Babel,” 632. 21 The phrase is from Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 13.

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world have been remarkably successful in reproducing Hungarians over the course of nearly a century of Romanian rule, even through decades of strongly nationalizing policies. They have been successful in reproducing people who take for granted that Hungarian can be spoken not only among family and friends but also in schools, churches, associations, and even some enterprises. And those institutions have themselves been successfully reproduced from day to day in and through Hungarians’ unselfconscious decisions (about whom to socialize with, what language to speak, what church to attend, what newspaper to read, what Internet sites to visit, whom to marry, and where to send children to school). Yet in the long run, the foundations of the Hungarian world in Cluj— and, more broadly, of the Hungarian presence in Transylvania—appear more precarious. The Hungarian world is largely self-reproducing, but not fully so. The social processes that work to erode that world at the margins, as we have indicated, have little to do with Romanian nationalism; erosion has increased even as Romanian nationalism has weakened, minority rights have been strengthened, and the Hungarian world has expanded. The erosion would be at best attenuated, not eliminated, even if all major DAHR demands—for autonomy, for extensive rights to the public use of Hungarian, and for a Hungarian university in Cluj—were realized in full. The Hungarian population in Cluj, and in Transylvania, remains substantial; its elaborate institutional networks hold considerable staying power. Yet the rhetoric of endangerment that is heard from nationally minded Hungarian intellectuals is not unfounded. It is an irony of history, in a region rich in such ironies, that the nationalization of the polyethnic, polyglot, polyreligious borderland region of Transylvania continues even as theorists of postnationalism and transnationalism celebrate the demise of the nation-state.

Appendix A




AN EXAMPLE OF THE INTERACTIONAL EMERGENCE OF NATIONALISM

We have studied ethnicity and nationalism in multiple contexts, ranging in scale and scope from East Central Europe as a whole to the family and individual, and from the span of a century to that of an interaction. To those committed or simply accustomed to thinking about ethnicity in larger spatial and temporal frames, our interest in the interactional microdynamics of ethnicity may have seemed puzzling. Yet there is still another level of analytic granularity that we have not explored, involving sustained attention to the shaping and reshaping of the local context of interaction in the course of the interaction itself. As analysts of interaction have shown, talk (and communicative action more generally) both responds to and transforms the context of interaction; it is both “context-shaped” and “context-renewing.”1 By examining in detail one fragment from our group discussion data, we seek to indicate here how close attention to the endogenously produced local context can contribute to the analysis of ethnicity in interaction. The passage we have chosen comes from a group discussion involving five retired professionals, four women and a man. The participants are friends who have known each other for years (and who meet every Sunday morning for a long walk in the woods on the outskirts of town). The talk immediately preceding the passage we analyze had addressed the glaring social and economic inequalities in postcommunist Romania, in contrast with the relative social and economic equality of the preceding regime. We provide the Romanian transcription, along with a literal translation that corresponds to the Romanian original line for line. Teodora: În probleme de politica˘, noi tot¸i care suntem aci suntem put¸in de stînga. Adica˘ noi pretindem o conducere care sa˘ duca˘ o politica˘

In matters of politics, all of us here are a little leftist. That is, we demand a leadership that would make politics

1 On this understanding of context as endogenous to and continually transformed within talk itself, see Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, esp. 242, 283; Schegloff, “Whose Text? Whose Context?”

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pentru cei mult¸i. Nu pentru clasa aceasta îmboga˘t¸ita˘, pentru cei mult¸i. Deci nu s¸tiu daca˘ dintre noi este vreunul care îi de extrema˘ //dreapta˘. Irina: //Noi nu suntem cei mult¸i, de fapt. Teodora: Suntem de stînga, io recunosc. Ori pe cine voi vota, numai cel care va promite ca˘ se va gîndi la cei mult¸i, numai pe a˘la îl votez. Tiberiu: Adica˘ indirect la buna˘starea t¸a˘rii. Teodora: Da. Tiberiu: Nu la buna˘starea unei clici. Teodora: Da! Emilia: Cercurile acestea concentrice, da. Casa˘, oras¸, Ardeal, //t¸ara˘. Flavia: //Interesul celorlalt¸i sa˘ dispara˘! Teodora: S¸i pe urma˘, sigur ca˘ am pretent¸ia ca cei care ma˘ conduc sa˘-mi asigure ca t¸ara mea nu va fi vînduta˘. Flavia: La . . . Teodora: Împart¸ita˘ s¸i data˘, Ardealu’ la a˘la s¸i Dobrogea la a˘lalalt. Deci daca˘ asta înseamna˘ nat¸ionalism, de-acolo-mi fac acte.

for the many. Not for this newly rich class, for the many. So I don’t know if among us there’s anyone who is on the extreme //right. // We’re not “the many,” in fact. We’re leftist, I admit. Whoever I’ll vote for, only the one who promises he will think of the many, that’s the one I’ll vote for. Meaning indirectly [the one who’ll think] of the welfare of the country. Yes. Not of the welfare of a clique. Yes! These concentric circles, yes. Home, town, Transylvania, //country. //The interest of the others should disappear! And then, of course I demand that those who govern me ensure that my country is not going to be sold. To . . . Divided and given away, Transylvania to that one and Dobruja to the other. So if this means nationalism, I’m officially a nationalist.

On first reading, the explicit affirmation of nationalism at the end of the excerpt seems puzzlingly abrupt. Up to Teodora’s penultimate turn, the relevant distinctions appear to be those of left and right, the many and the few. But closer examination shows how the discursive materials

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with which Teodora formulates her nationalist stance were themselves introduced, transformed, and made “available” in the local interactional context through the immediately preceding sequence of talk. At the beginning of the excerpt, Teodora characterizes herself and her co-participants as “a little leftist.” She does so by way of accounting for the critical comments others had just made about the nouveau riche stratum in Romania. In postcommunist Romania, “leftist” can be a problematic category. Teodora displays her orientation to this by qualifying “leftist” with “a little,” and then offering an innocuous definition of “leftist” as a stance that demands a government whose policies would benefit “the many,” not the “newly rich class.” She then expands the category of “leftist” still further by expressing her doubt that any member of their group could be on the “extreme right.” This ultra-inclusive redefinition of “leftist” as anyone who is not on the far right serves to neutralize the negative connotations of “leftist” and makes it difficult for her co-participants to disagree with her characterization of the group’s political stance. Yet Irina does not fully align with this. Although she does not challenge Teodora’s characterization of the group as “leftist,” she points out that the members of the group cannot “in fact” themselves be considered part of “the many.” All are indeed better off than the average pensioner. But Irina’s reference here is not simply to economic well-being; it invokes the self-understanding of the participants—made explicit elsewhere in this and other conversations—as members of an educated elite. Teodora responds by reiterating and reformulating her characterization of the group as “leftist.” (She frames this reiterated characterization as an “admission,” further evidence of the potentially problematic nature of “leftist.”) This time she elaborates on what this means for voting behavior. She would vote only for someone who promised to think of “the many.” Tiberiu aligns with Teodora’s stance by expanding on her comment, observing that such a candidate would also contribute “indirectly to the welfare of the country” and not just to the “welfare of a clique,” with which Teodora emphatically agrees. Emilia agrees as well, but reformulates the point in terms of “concentric circles”: “home, town, Transylvania, country.” Flavia then intervenes to say that the “interest of the others should disappear,” that is, should not count. The notion of “interests” was implicit in Teodora’s and Tiberiu’s previous turns: the interests of the many in opposition to those of the few, and the interests of the country in opposition to those of a clique. Although Flavia does not specify who “the others” are, the exchange so far frames the understanding of “others” as the “clique” of rich people. Teodora’s next turn does not directly engage Flavia’s comment. Instead, picking up on her previous point about what she and her friends expect of

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their elected leaders—and introducing this turn as if it followed naturally from her previous comment (“and then of course”)—she expresses her “demand” for leaders who would ensure that the country, “my country,” would not be “sold.” Flavia begins a turn with the preposition “to”—formulating this as a continuation and specification of Teodora’s immediately preceding “sold to”—but then breaks off. Prompted by Flavia’s minimal intervention, Teodora elaborates on the meaning of “sold”: “divided and given away,” Transylvania to one party, Dobruja to another. She does not specify to whom these two regions would be “sold” or “given.” In this context, there is no need for her to do so: the reference is clearly to Hungary and Bulgaria, to which parts of Transylvania and Dobruja were in fact awarded during World War II, a period of which these elderly Clujeni retain vivid personal memories. Teodora concludes by drawing out the implications of her position: “So if this means nationalism, I’m officially a nationalist.” The hypothetical formulation—“if this means nationalism”—shows Teodora’s orientation to the fact that “nationalist,” like “leftist,” is a potentially problematic category with which to identify, given its potentially discrediting associations with the extreme right, from which she has already expressly distanced herself (and her friends). This construction allows Teodora to dissociate herself from other, more common meanings of “nationalism,” while allowing her to propose an alternative understanding. If concern for the territorial integrity of her country— otherwise understandable as a form of “patriotism”—constitutes nationalism, then “nationalist” is an identity Teodora is willing to publicy and “officially” embrace. Throughout this exchange, characterizations and category memberships have to do with political stances. But the bases of political characterizations shift subtly, turn by turn, from socioeconomic to ethnonational. The shift is predicated on the redefinition of the “interests” of “the many,” initially construed as the interests of the economically unprivileged, but by the end of the excerpt as those of ethnic Romanians. There are three key steps in this shift. First, the notion of “country” is introduced. “Country” is initially placed in opposition to “clique”; the reference is clearly to Romania as a whole, with no ethnic overtones. Second, “Transylvania” is introduced, as an intermediate member of a nested set ranging from the smallest (home) to the largest (country). There is still no hint of ethnicity or nationalism; gradations within the set are defined solely by scale. However, the specification of this fourmember set introduces new discursive resources beyond those provided by the previous binary opposition between “the many” (or the country) and the newly rich stratum (or the clique). Third, the notion of “the others” and their (illegitimate) interests is introduced.

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In the preceding talk, the implicit reference to illegitimate interests (those to which political leaders ought not to cater) was to the interests of the newly rich, or the clique. The explicit reference at this point to unspecified “others” and their (illegitimate) interests creates the space for another “other,” as it were, to emerge: not the “vertical” other that had been considered so far (the newly rich on top versus the unprivileged many below), but a “horizontal” other—Hungary as opposed to Romania, or Hungarians as opposed to Romanians. It makes possible the redeployment of “Transylvania,” now in a nationalist frame; the reformulation of “country” as “my country,” a country in danger of being divided up and sold; and finally Teodora’s “official” self-identification as a “nationalist.” This analysis has shown how ethnic nationalism emerges interactionally through the appropriation and transformation of discursive resources made available (in a non-ethnic frame) in the immediately preceding turns of talk: “country,” “Transylvania,” and unspecified “others.” In this sense, the context for Teodora’s defiant affirmation of nationalism, and the discursive materials from which it is assembled, are not external to the conversation; they are created in the course of the conversation itself. Of course broader contexts are relevant as well, as our analysis has indicated. Particularly relevant is the circumstance that the participants all lived through the wartime interlude of renewed Hungarian rule in northern Transylvania. This shared experience grounds their shared understanding of the recurrent references in postcommunist Romanian nationalist discourse to the alleged danger of Hungarian territorial revisionism, and it underlies their heightened sensitivity to the status of Transylvania, the prospective “autonomy” of which had been the subject of considerable public debate around this time.2 But it is the discursive context established by the immediately preceding talk that provides both the occasion for the interactional emergence of nationalism and the materials from which nationalism is, quite literally, constructed. 2

See chapter 12, pp. 346–47.

Appendix B




A NOTE ON DATA

The data on which the second part of this book is based were collected over a nine-year period, from 1995 to 2003.1 Most of the field research was conducted between 1996 and 2001, during which time we were working in Cluj, in varying combinations, for a minimum of several weeks, and in some cases several months, each year. The data we use most extensively in Part Two (and, in supplementary fashion, in parts of chapters 3 and 4 in Part One) are drawn from interviews, group discussions, and ethnographic observation; we describe here the manner in which these data were collected. We conducted well over a hundred interviews, all in Romanian or Hungarian (or both languages). Given the continuous spectrum of variation between formal, recorded interviews, at one pole, and informal conversations, at the other, passing through a wide range of intermediate forms, it is impossible to specify the precise number.2 Most interviews were with a single subject, but a substantial minority involved two or more people, often couples or even entire families.3 Most of the more formal and substantial interviews lasted between one and three hours, with a few continuing over multiple sessions for as long as six hours. We conducted many shorter—and usually less formal—interviews as well. Several people (including all of the subjects of our portraits in chapter 5) were interviewed more than once, as we followed their individual and familial trajectories from the mid-1990s through 2001 (with some later follow-ups as well). Interview subjects were selected through snowball sampling from a wide range of starting points. Only a few of our interviews were with A brief account of the genesis and development of the project is provided in the preface. Of the formal interviews that were recorded and transcribed, fifty yielded transcripts of at least 5,000 words (and up to 28,000 words) each; taken together, our interview transcripts total about 700,000 words. About thirty formal interviews were not recorded; we have detailed notes on these, taken during the conversation, and supplemented immediately afterwards. We also have detailed notes (and in some cases shorter transcripts) for a much larger number of less formal interviews and conversations. All told, our interview notes, considering only those that were typed and coded, amount to about 200,000 words; many more were recorded in notebooks but not typed up. In addition, we have drawn occasionally on fifty-one interviews with university students conducted by Fox and sixteen interviews conducted by Feischmidt for their respective dissertation projects. 3 In a few cases, we were able to supplement family interviews by recording informal conversations in family settings. We draw extensively on one such conversation in chapter 12, pp. 350–52. 1 2

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people known personally to any of us before our research began. Our prior contacts were skewed toward better educated Clujeni; even apart from this bias, we wanted to avoid interviewing people in circles already known to us. We did draw on our prior contacts for connections to their less well-educated acquaintances. But we also sought to extend and broaden our networks in other ways. In the early phases of our research, Brubaker and Fox, using a privilege available to them as foreigners, often struck up conversations with strangers in public places (in squares, parks and playgrounds, outside churches, at markets, and in shops and cafes). Most of these were brief encounters, on which we simply took notes. Some led to more sustained conversations, further meetings, and recorded interviews. Eight in-depth follow-up interviews were conducted with selected respondents to a large-scale survey Brubaker and Feischmidt conducted in 1996, whose initial respondents had been randomly selected.4 We conducted two sorts of interviews: general open-ended interviews with ordinary Clujeni, and a variety of more targeted and focused—but still open-ended—interviews with specific categories of respondents. In the general interviews, we took care not to impose our interest in ethnicity on our subjects. Aware that ethnicity is all too easy to find if one goes looking for it,5 we sought to avoid introducing ethnicity as a theme or asking direct questions about it, except in following up on a point when ethnicity had already been introduced by an interviewee. Our strategy was to indicate that our main interest was in everyday life in Cluj since the change of regime. We asked about life stories and family background; about everyday life in the Ceaus¸escu era, and how things had changed since the quasi-revolution of 1989; about the changing face of the city; about friends, neighbors, and colleagues; about generational differences in experiences and expectations; about leisure-time activities; about travel within and outside Romania; about television watching, radio listening, and newspaper and magazine reading habits; about religious affiliations and practices; and about everyday experiences in workplaces, schools, shops, administrative offices, and public spaces. We asked about everyday cares and concerns, and about strategies for getting by or getting ahead. Coming closer to the political domain, but still avoiding directly priming ethnicity, we asked about local and national politics; about differences between Romania and other countries; about differences between Transylvania and southern Romania and the controversial 4 The survey itself, arranged in haste and conducted on a shoestring budget, was valuable chiefly for these contacts—and for the lessons we learned about the pitfalls of survey research in postcommunist Romania. 5 On this hazard, see Moerman, “Accomplishing Ethnicity,” 66–67; Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 161.

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subject of Transylvanian autonomy; about differences between Transylvanian towns; and about emigration from Romania. In introducing these topics, we were interested in the ways in which respondents framed their accounts in ethnic or, more often, in non-ethnic terms. Our targeted interviews include one large set with thirty-three intermarried couples and some of their children conducted by Grancea, and several smaller sets: a few interviews with Hungarian entrepreneurs by Feischmidt; brief conversations with Clujeni in the two main squares (concerning the everyday uses of the squares) by Grancea and Feischmidt; a few oral history individual and group interviews with older Clujeni by Grancea and Sanda Tomulet¸iu, a local research assistant; and a few life-history interviews by Brubaker and Fox. In these interviews, too, we sought to avoid introducing ethnicity as a focus of discussion, though this proved difficult to do when interviewing Hungarian entrepreneurs or intermarried couples and their children. The informal group discussions that we organized were a variant of the practice better known in the literature as the “focus group.” Strategies for organizing and conducting focus groups vary widely.6 Since our aim was to observe and record informal talk about matters that are often discussed in everyday life, rather than to elicit responses to highly structured questions (as is the case in much focus group research), our first concern was to provide a congenial environment for discussion. Groups were small (usually six participants, sometimes five); participants generally knew one another already; and talk proceeded over food and drink. This sort of structured social gathering stands at the margin of focus group research; hence our decision to refer to “group discussions” rather than to “focus groups.” Group discussions, like interviews, were used to explore and assess the everyday significance of ethnicity and the responsiveness—or lack of responsiveness—of ordinary citizens to ethnopolitical appeals. But they did so in a different manner. Given the aim of exploring everyday ethnicity, group discussions had one significant advantage over interviews: their interactive nature. When group discussions worked well, they served to generate social interaction rather than simply to elicit responses: participants responded to one another, not to the prompts, cues, or questions of an interviewer or moderator. Even though the interaction thus stimulated was “artificially” engendered, it often took on a life of its own and transcended, at least in part, the context that gave rise to it. Interviews can sometimes do the same. But even the best interviews involve interaction between subject and interviewer, while group discussions in6 From the large literature on focus groups, see illustratively Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research; D. Stewart and Shamdasani, Focus Groups. Our informal group discussions resemble the “peer group conversations” described by Gamson in Talking Politics, pp. 191–94.

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volve interaction among subjects themselves. They therefore provide an opportunity to observe social interaction—albeit in a constrained setting—that interviews do not. Themes were introduced by a moderator, but discussions were allowed considerable leeway to develop their own dynamic. As in the interviews, we indicated that we were primarily interested in everyday life since the fall of Ceaus¸escu. Discussion was organized around three broad themes with a half-hour or forty-five minutes allotted to each: getting by under difficult and uncertain economic circumstances; migration (which often came up spontaneously in connection with getting by); and whether politics mattered for ordinary people in their everyday lives. In seeking to explore through group discussions the ways in which ethnicity “happens” in everyday interaction, we again avoided signaling a special interest in ethnicity. In group discussions, as in most interviews, we did not ask direct questions about ethnicity or nationality (except occasionally toward the end of a group discussion, usually in following up on a point that had already been introduced by a participant). Our strategy was to introduce topics with no prima facie connection to ethnicity or nationality, and then to see whether, when, and how such matters were framed in ethnic terms. The aim was to let ethnicity emerge spontaneously—to the extent that it emerged at all—in the course of discussion. When it did not, this did not represent a failure to gather data; it was a significant datum in its own right. We sought to organize groups that were homogeneous by ethnicity and relatively homogeneous by generation and education.7 We distinguished roughly between three generations: (1) 18- to 23-year-olds, who were still children in 1989, and who reached adolescence after the fall of communism; (2) 30- to 40-year-olds, who were already young adults in 1989; and (3) persons over 55, old enough to have experienced as adults the dramatic growth and ethnic transformation of Cluj between 1960 and 1985. We sought also to arrange groups with roughly equivalent levels of education. And we wanted groups composed of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (though not of family members), rather than of strangers. We tried to find a single person who would assume responsibility for assembling the group according to the criteria we provided. This did not always work out according to plan. Not all groups were homogeneous by generation or educational level; and many groups included participants who knew only some but not all of the 7 Since one of the findings of our field research was that potentially “sensitive” topics are avoided in ethnically mixed company (see chapter 10, pp. 307–9), we preferred ethnically homogeneous groups; conversation was indeed more inhibited in the few ethnically mixed groups that we organized. Some groups did include persons of mixed background; this was not a problem, and it sometimes played into discussion in interesting ways.

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others. Unlike interview subjects, who were not paid, group discussion participants received a modest payment for their participation, and the organizer received a bit more. We conducted thirty-three group discussions, almost all of them in 2000 and 2001.8 Discussions lasted two hours, sometimes a bit longer. All were recorded and all but three were transcribed in full by native speakers.9 Since we were interested not only in the substance of a given discussion but also in its interactional dynamics and its tone, stance, and style, transcribers were instructed to try to capture tone of voice, interruptions, pauses, laughter, and so on. They were variably successful in doing so. The more animated discussions, characterized by frequent overlap among speakers, were particularly difficult to transcribe with the accuracy and level of detail we desired. For all materials from group discussions (and recorded interviews) that we quote in the text, tapes were checked, and transcripts corrected, by Grancea. The use of recorded data for open-ended interviews and informal group discussions allowed us to quote with confidence from our data.10 It also enabled us to attend closely to interactional dynamics through repeated scrutiny of the same strip of interactional data.11 This is something that cannot be done with ethnographic data, no matter how good one’s memory or how detailed one’s field notes. Yet ethnographic observation remains indispensable for any study that is concerned with everyday life. Interview and group discussion data were generated within specific and artificial social settings, the spatial, temporal, organizational, and thematic parameters of which were defined by the researchers, not by the participants. We did what we could to mitigate that artificiality; in the best of our interviews, and in numerous group discussions, the “frame” disappeared, or at least receded into the background. But without our extended ethnographic fieldwork, we would have had no way of assessing what we heard in interviews and group discussions. We would have been unable to distinguish the standardized formulations that are produced for outsiders—of which we 8 We moderated eighteen of the discussions ourselves, in almost all cases with two of us present. Fifteen discussions were moderated by Sanda Tomulet¸iu. A graduate of the Central European University Nationalism Studies program, Tomulet¸iu had acquired experience with this method while conducting research in Cluj for her MA thesis under Brubaker’s direction. 9 The group discussion transcripts comprised nearly 600,000 words. 10 Most quotations from ordinary Clujeni in the text are translations from recorded materials; we quote from field notes and from notes on unrecorded interviews only when our notes specify the exact wording. In translating from Romanian and Hungarian, we have tried to capture the colloquial flavor that was characteristic of many group discussions without sacrificing accuracy. 11 To facilitate close scrutiny of interesting segments of interviews and group discussions, we digitized substantial excerpts from many of them. (During our research, we used tape recorders; only toward the end of our field research did high-quality, moderately priced digital recorders become widely available.)

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heard plenty—from the ways in which ordinary Clujeni talk in everyday social settings. Our fieldwork enabled us to be critical and selective users of our interview and group discussion data; it enabled us to know when that data was broadly representative, and when it was largely an artifact of the interview or group discussion situation. Our fieldwork took a variety of forms. We exchanged small talk with pensioners in the main squares on summer evenings, hung out with students in Cluj’s smokiest pubs, and talked informally with taxi drivers whenever we could. We observed interactions—and patterns of language use in particular—in public and private settings. We spent a great deal of time informally with all of the subjects of our portraits (and a handful of other Clujeni as well), in some cases staying with them in their apartments for periods of up to three months. We read the local newspapers, and observed how others read them. We observed the commemorations of major Romanian and Hungarian national holidays. We watched the cityscape as it changed over the course of nearly a decade; we observed not only the diffusion of national colors, but the opening of new shops, the building of new churches, the proliferation of advertising banners and placards, the changing mix of cars, the shifting fashions in clothing, and the opening of the town’s first McDonald’s. Our observations in the field—recorded in detailed field notes—were supplemented, enriched, and checked by the “native” knowledge brought to the project by Feischmidt and Grancea, who grew up in Cluj and lived there until 1991 and 1998, respectively. Our ethnographic observations informed all other aspects of our research. They guided our interviews and group discussions, helping us to shape the questions we asked and to contextualize the responses we received, and giving us confidence in the validity and representativity of the data we cite from interviews and group discussions.12 All of our interview and group discussion transcripts, and most of our fieldnotes as well, were coded by Feischmidt, Fox, and Grancea using Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis software. All transcripts were coded in their original languages. We spent a great deal of time working out and testing an elaborate—in retrospect no doubt an overly elaborate— coding scheme; and we probably erred on the side of overcoding. But Atlas.ti did serve very well in helping to organize what would otherwise have been an unmanageable corpus of more than a million and a half words of coded transcripts and notes. 12 In addition to the three main sources of data described above, we assembled a comprehensive collection of articles from local Romanian and Hungarian newspapers (and from selected regional and statewide Romanian and Hungarian papers) from October 1997 through June 2004. This press archive, organized thematically as well as chronologically, was prepared for us by local research assistants, Éva Borbély and Ádám Bíró.

BIBLIOGRAPHY




Official Sources Unpublished 1991 Parliamentary Report on Taˆrgu-Mures¸ violence, cited in chapter 4 as “Parliamentary Report.” Raportul Comisiei de ancheta˘ instituita˘ în vederea cerceta˘rii evenimentelor petrecute în municipiul Taˆrgu-Mures¸ în zilele de 19 s¸i 20 martie 1990. Census Materials Historical and contemporary figures on the ethnic and religious composition of Cluj and other Transylvanian towns, unless otherwise specified, are from the censuses of Hungary and Romania. The historical statistics were published in Erdély etnikai és felekezeti statisztikája, 6 vols, ed. Árpád Varga (Miercurea-Ciuc [Csíkszereda]: Pro-Print Kiadó, 1998–2002); they have since been made available online, at http://varga.adatbank.transindex.ro/, where one can search by town, and at http://www.kia.hu/konyvtar/erdely/vallas.htm, where one can download PDF files with comprehensive information for each county. For the population of Cluj by ethnicity and religion from the 2002 census, see http://adatbazis.mtaki.hungary.com/?mtaki_id=108439&settlement_name=. Statistics on occupation from Romania’s 1930 census are reported in Institutul Central de Statistica˘, Recensa˘maˆntul General al Populat¸iei Romaˆniei, vol. 5, Profesiuni. Bucharest: Editura Institutului Central de Statistica˘, 1940.

Newspapers Cluj Newspapers, post-19891 Adeva˘rul de Cluj (Romanian daily, Cluj) Monitorul de Cluj (Romanian daily, Cluj), archived since 2001 at http://www .monitorulcluj.ro/arhiva.php Szabadság (Hungarian daily, Cluj), archived since 1996 at http://www.hhrf .org/szabadsag/uj/index.php?old=archivum.php Other Newspapers, post-1989 Adeva˘rul (Romanian daily, Bucharest) Curentul (Romanian daily, Bucharest) Cuvîntul liber (Romanian daily, Taˆrgu-Mures¸) 1 In citing newspapers from Cluj and Ta ˆ rgu-Mures¸, we have provided newspaper names and dates, not article titles, since these papers are small and easily scanned. (In a few cases, where we cite lengthy opinion pieces, we provide full information in the bibliography.) In addition to newspapers, we cite a few items from the RFE/RL Newsline, archived at http://www.rferl.org/newsline/.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Erdélyi Napló (Hungarian weekly, Transylvania-wide) Népújság (Hungarian daily, Taˆrgu-Mures¸) Other Newspapers, by period in which they are cited communist period

Fa˘clia (Romanian) 1940–44

Keleti Újság (Hungarian) Magyar Nép (Hungarian) Tribuna Asociat¸iei Refugiat¸ilor s¸i Expulzat¸ilor din Ardealul Ocupat (Romanian, published in Sibiu) interwar period

Patria (Romanian) T¸ara Noastra˘ (Romanian) Voint¸a (Romanian) dualist era

Ellenzék (Hungarian)

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INDEX




Andric´, Ivo, 146n89 antisemitism, 50, 335n6; in Hungary, 78–80, 78n86, 102, 102n47, 103–4, 104–5, 105nn58–59; in Romania, 75, 79–80, 79n90, 80n95, 104. See also Jews Antonescu, Ion, 80 archaeology, as instrument of nationalization, 103, 103n51, 141, 143–44, plate 14b assimilation, 367, 370, 370n12; in Dualist Hungary, 42–43, 65–66, 65n35, 68–70, 78, 78n87, 95, 95n20; and intermarriage, 275, 275n19, 298–99, 370–72, 370nn14–15; in interwar Romania, 70; in postcommunist Romania, 149–50n100, 297–99, 370, 372. See also nationalization associations, 91n10, 287–90, 290n56; and churches, 279, 281–82; ethnic and nonethnic, 290n55; and nationalism, 287–88, 287n47, 289; and shaping of social relations, 288–90. See also institutions Austria, 41–42, 47, 47n51, 65n35 autonomy: alternative understandings of, 67n44, 338, 346–47, 348–49, 350; ethnic, 41n31, 49–50, 67–68, 82, 125, 154n119, 136, 338, 346–47, 349–50, 371–72n18; regional, 75n73, 338, 347–49, 347n20, 348n, 350; territorial, 371–72n18 Avram Iancu Square, 142, plate 11b Bauer, Otto, 41n31 bilingualism, 108, 239n3, 284, 371n17; asymmetrical, 99, 240–42, 240n5, 242n14, 243–64 passim, 271; forms and degrees of, 241, 241n10. See also language choice; language mixing; language policing

Bosnia, 54n70, 162n149, 239n1, 369n10 Bucharest, 120, 185, 185n10, 327, 347–50 Budapest, 327, 367n Bulgaria, 32, 38n24, 48, 54, 378 Bulgarians, 38n24, 45n46, 81n100 business, as strategy for getting ahead, 199, 201, 203–5 Catalonia, 29n8, 243n16 251n25, 350, 372 categories, 207–38; and accountability, 224–29; and claims to insider status, 226–27, 237, 341; cognitive and discursive aspects of, 207, 209, 221, 221n34; doing things with, 11–12, 11n28, 224–31; ethnic and nonethnic, 237–38; and groups, 11–13, 12n32, 209–10; marked and unmarked, 19, 211–12, 211–12n11, 237, 243, 243nn15–16, 266, 267–68, 273–74, 290n55; moral, 194–96, 205–6; policing membership of, 229–30, 341; regional, 231–37, 376–79; socioeconomic, 196, 205–6, 375–78; vernacular and analytic, 9, 9n20; category sets, 213 Ceaus¸escu, 83, 85n122, 109–10; fall of, 119–22, 121n7 census, 18n45, 46n48, 65n35, 98n32, 102n45, 107nn76–77, 108n79, 318n8, 343n, 366; political struggles over, 98n32, 151–59, 151n106, 152n107, 153nn115–116, 154n117, Plate 7 churches, 94, 277–83, 282n36; Calvinist, 59–60, 90, 98n31, 119–20, 129, 150n103, 278–82, 291, 366n4; Catholic, 38, 59–60, 59–60n11, 66, 66n41, 90, 138, 271n9, 279–82, 289, 366n4; and ethnic reproduction, 278–79, 278n22, 280–83;

430

INDEX

churches (continued) Greek Catholic, 45n45, 59–60n11, 82, 91, 100, 100n40, 102n45, 144n85, 152n107, 278–79, 279n30; Hungarian, 59–60, 70, 76, 82, 83–84, 98n31, 150, 154, 155, 278–83, 295, 314n, 366n4; Lutheran, 59–60, 66n41, 90–91, 91n8; Orthodox, 38, 38n24, 45n45, 59–60, 59–60n11, 91, 100, 100n40,102n45, 144n85, 152n107, 278–79, 314n22, 348n28; Orthodox cathedral, 100–1, 142, Plates 11b, 13; and property restitution, 144n85, 279, 279n30; and religiosity, 279, 280, 280n; Romanian, 66, 66n41, 91, 95n20, 100n40, 102n45, 278–79; St. Michael’s, 3, 90, 99, 138, 142, 143, 280–81, plate 11a; Unitarian, 58, 59, 90, 90n7. See also institutions; religion citizenship: and border crossing, 321–22; dual, 327–28, 328n21; and ethnicity, 213–15, 222n39, 238, 321, 324–25, 328–32, 352–55; and migration, 321–26; and nationality, 14–15, 213, 231, 328–31; stigmatized, 321–26; civil society. See associations civilizational divide, rhetoric of, 114–16, 232–33, 347–48, 348n Cluj: apartment block districts in, 113–16, 113n95, 115n97, plate 20; changing ethnic composition of, 90–91, 91n11, 92–95, 95n20, 98, 98n32, 102, 102n45, 107–108, 107nn76–77, 108n79, 110–13, 115–16, 134, 158–59, 297–98, 366–67, 366nn3–4, 368–70, 373; communist era in, 105–18; —, end of, 120–22; Dualist era in, 91–97; early history of, 89–91; everyday life in, 165–206; Funar era in, 136–63, 339–43; —, end of, 365–66;

historiographic controversy over, 89; industrialization of, 111–15, 174, 177, 179–80, 182–83, 367, plates 19a–b; interwar era in, 97–101; migration to and from, 95, 98, 102, 105, 107–8, 111–16, 200–1, 297–98, 316–32, 366n4, 367, 368–70, 369nn8–9, 371–72; nationalist politics in, 1–6, 89, 92, 95–107, 109–10, 112–13, 122–23, 127–28, 133–61; nationalization of, 91–105, 109–18, 138–46, 366–73, plates 2, 3, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16d; popular perspectives on transformation of, 113–17, 174–75, 177, 179–80, 182–83, 245; symbolic geography of, 99–101, 101n41, 142; World War II in, 101–5, 176–77 Cluj-Napoca, xxi, 110, 140. See also Cluj commonsense knowledge, 6, 9, 9n20, 217–18, 232, 248–49, 252, 252n27, 262–64, 262n44, 270, 325, 331, 336. See also stereotypes Communist Party. See Romanian Communist Party constructivism, 7–9, 7n14, 9n19; in everyday talk, 355 conversation analysis, 15n40, 213, 224n43, 260n39, 375–79 corruption, 196, 197–98, 198n14, 202, 202n29, 204, 205, 334–35, 342 Council of Europe, 126 Croats and Croatia, 34, 38n24, 40–43, 46–47, 46n48, 47n50, 135n47, 162n149, 162n153, 239n1, 348n24 Czechs and Czechoslovakia, 32n13, 34, 40, 43, 46–48, 46n18, 47nn51 and 53, 49n57, 51–54, 52n66, 68, 73n66, 369n10 Daco-Roman continuity theory, 57, 57n2, 66–67n42, 89, 110, 140. See also historiography, nationalist framing of Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), 123–25, 163n153, 338, 343–46;

INDEX and autonomy, 125, 154n119, 343n17, 371–72n18; and census, 153–59, 154n19, 158n139; and demand for separate Hungarian university, 147–50, 148n94, 149–50n100; Hungarian criticisms of, 231, 338, 344–46; Hungarian support for, 338, 343–44, 343n; and Hungarian world, 147–48, 148n94, 149–50n100, 284–85, 289–90, 371–73; and nationalist politics, 5, 124–25, 127, 130–32, 135–36, 137–38, 143–45, 160, 328n21, 371–73; diglossia, 259n37, 271. See also bilingualism; language economic conditions and strategies, 191–206, 316–21. See also nationalist politics, economic aspects of English, 202–3, 203nn30–31, 312n18, 372 Estonia, 369n10, 372 ethnic division of labor, 283n38. See also ethnic enterprise; towns, nationalization of ethnic enclaves, 268–69, 268n3, 284. See also Hungarian world ethnic endogamy, 298–99, 370; churches and, 278–9, 278n22, 279n26; schools and, 148, 297. See also Hungarian world; intermarriage ethnic enterprise, 202n27, 268n3, 283–87; and ethnic reproduction, 148, 283, 287; and language, 285–86, 286n44, 287; types of, 286, 286nn44–46. See also institutions ethnic honor, 180, 231 ethnic mobilization, popular, 62, 68, 95–96, 122–23, 128–36, 142–45; weakness of, 3–4, 5–6, 144–45, 151, 153n112, 157, 160–61. See also nationalist politics ethnic networks, 88, 117–18, 170, 185–86, 202, 266, 269, 277, 285, 286n45, 295–96, 297, 298, 369n9; and associations, 288–90; and churches, 256, 281–83; and schools, 148, 271–72, 274–75, 370. See also Hungarian world; institutions

431

ethnic slurs, 235, 306–7, 310, 328–29, 331 ethnic socialization, 217–18, 261–62, 273n14, 274n16, 280–81, 299–300; in schools, 270–71, 273, 274. See also institutions ethnic violence, 3–5, 5n10, 38n24, 62, 76, 79–80, 80n97, 104, 128–36, 137, 137n54, 145, 145n87, 160–63, 161nn147–48, 162nn149–51, 163n153 ethnicity: and boundaries, 8n17, 9, 10, 18, 27, 28, 28n5, 29, 29n8, 266, 268, 278–79, 348n24; and citizenship, 213–15, 222n39, 238, 321, 324–25, 328–32, 352–55; constructivist accounts of, 7–9, 7n14, 9n19, 355; cues to, 217–224; danger of analytic imposition of, 15, 168, 169, 191, 206, 237–38, 363, 381–82, 383; as embodied phenomenon, 208n3, 217–8, 232–34, 241, 255–57, 264, 359; enactment of, 167, 221–38, 239–64 passim, 301–315 passim, 329–30, 332, 359–60, 362, 375–79; everyday experience of, xvi-xvii, 6–7, 15–16, 167–68, 168nn2–3, 191–332 passim, 359–60, 361–64, 365–66; groupist accounts of, 7–10, 10nn22–24, 24n2, 357, 372; Hungarian-Romanian asymmetries in experience of, 19, 146, 188, 203n31, 207, 207n, 210, 211–16, 218, 219, 229–30, 240–42, 264, 265, 267–68, 301n1, 315, 338, 340, 343–44, 357, 359, 370n14; Hungarian-Romanian differences in salience of, 215–16, 338; intermittency of, 208, 208n3, 210, 301–15, 362–63; invisibility of, 190, 266, 273–74, 301–2; and labor markets, 201–2, 201n26, 202nn27–28; limited relevance of, 181, 188, 190, 191, 196–97, 201–2, 204–7, 340, 362–63; multiple forms of, 6–7, 357–60;

432

INDEX

ethnicity (continued) and nationalism, 14; nominal and experiential forms of, 12–13, 209–10, 301–3, 314–15; and region, 231–37; and religion, 3n3, 95n20, 102n45, 232, 239n1, 278, 278n23; reproduction of, 148, 265, 266, 270–75, 277, 278, 280–83, 284–85, 292–94, 297–300, 359, 363–64, 363n7, 366, 368–73; and stigma, 233–34, 233n60, 235–36, 321–22, 321–22n12, 323–25, 324n14, 328–31; temporal dimensions of, 360–62; variable salience of, 12–13, 15–16, 15n39, 167–68, 168nn2–3, 301–3, 362–63; as way of seeing, 12, 15, 207–8, 209, 262–63, 358. See also categories; commonsense knowledge; language; language choice; nationalism ethnicization, 15–16, 115–16, 198n17, 204, 205, 216, 264, 286; of conflict and violence, 43, 51, 62, 107, 108n78, 134–35; in interethnic interactions, 301–315; of labor market competition, 201–2, 201n26, 202nn27–28; of migration, 318–19, 323–26, 328–32; in mixed marriages, 196–97, 303, 303n, 304–6, 310, 311–14; of political talk, 338 ethnographic observation, xvii, 15–16, 384–85 European integration, 55, 126, 163, 163n153, 325–26, 348n, 368, 368n7, 370n11; and continued nationalization, 368–70 European Union, 126, 368, 368n7, 369–70, 370n11 Finland, minority rights in, 371, 371n16 flags. See national colors France, 28, 28n5, 65, 66, 270, 270n6, 277 French Revolution, 361 Funar, Gheorghe: and census, 152–53, 156–59; defeat of, 365;

distancing stances toward, 4–5, 226–27, 231, 339–43; inflammatory rhetoric of, 5, 136–37, 358; nationalizing initiatives of, 1, 3–4, 127, 136–46, 152–53, 153n112, 160–61, 222n38, 358, plates 1–3, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15; support for, 243–44, 339–40, 339–40n12, 342. See also national colors; plaques; statues gender, 196, 306, 308 generation, 196, 295; and experience of ethnicity, 117, 341, 352; Germans, 17–18, 38–39, 42, 45n46, 47–48, 49n57, 52, 52n66, 327n19, 367, 367n, 369n10; in Cluj, 90–91; in Transylvania, 57–59, 65n33 and 35, 66, 66n41, 70, 76, 85n122, 366n3. See also Saxons Germany, 34n14, 47n51, 48, 49n57, 50–51, 51–52n65, 54, 79–80, 105, 327n19, 369n10 Gherman, Sabin, 347n20 globalization, 367–68 government, as constitutive other, 117, 196, 334–36, 335n6 Greater Romania Party, 4, 125, 136, 153n12, 334, 346n Greece, 32, 239n1 group discussions, 336–37, 337n8, 382–84 groupism, 7–10, 10nn22–24, 24n2, 357, 372 groupness, xiv, 9, 11, 13 groups, and categories, 11–13, 12n32, 209–10 Groza, Petru, 80n98 Gypsies. See Roma Habsburg Empire, 29–30, 32, 34–43; collapse of, 43; emergence of nationalism in, 34–37, 35n16; ethnic heterogeneity of, 37–39; ethnonational and historic-rights claims in, 34–36, 39–41, 40n30; restructuring of, 41–42 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 28n7, 36

INDEX historiography, nationalist framing of, 23–24, 56n1, 57, 62, 62n19, 83, 89, 90n6, 140 Hitler, Adolph, 50–51, 76 Hungarian Autonomous Region, 82, 82n103, 83, 136n48 Hungarian consulate, 1–4, 141, plate 1; theft of flag from, 3–4 Hungarian language, Romanians’ knowledge of, 64–65, 64n29, 65n35, 95, 95n20, 99, 99n35, 175, 176, 178, 178n, 219, 240, 240n8, 244, 245–46. See also bilingualism; language Hungarian national movement (pre-1867), 35, 35n17, 61, 61n14 Hungarian schools (in Romania), 269–77; in communist era, 81, 83–85, 88, 88n131, 117–18, 127–28; and ethnic reproduction, 83–84, 270–75, 271n9, 277, 278; and ethnic socialization, 84n116, 270–71, 271n9, 273, 274; and Hungarian world in Cluj, 270–77, 297; in interwar era, 72–73, 76, 99; postcommunist conflict over, 127–34; and shaping of social relations, 271–72, 274–75, 282–83, 285. See also schools; universities; Hungarian world Hungarian world, 184–87, 212, 243n15, 265–300, 359; and churches, 279–83; erosion of, 366, 373; and ethnic enterprise, 283–87; extra-institutional extensions of, 170, 286n45, 296, 296nn73–74; and Hungarian university, 148, 148n94, 149n100; institutions and reproduction of, 148, 265, 266, 270–75, 277, 278, 280–83, 284–85, 292–94, 297–300, 368, 372–73; limits of, 187, 275–77, 275n18, 282, 284, 290, 294–95, 297–99, 301, 370; linguistic aspects of, 271, 274, 274n16, 281, 286–87, 286n44, 292, 295, 300; and links to Hungary, 269, 274–75, 290, 290n54, 291–92, 293, 293n64, 298, 327–28, 327n20, 368; and media, 291–95;

433

and migration to Hungary, 297–98, 327–32, 371; as parallel world, 211, 266–67, 270, 290n55, 291, 311; reduced salience of ethnicity in, 266, 273–74, 359; and schools, 269–77, 297; taken-for-grantedness of, 212, 225, 267–68, 270, 272–73, 274n16, 281, 292–93, 296n73, 297, 300; and voluntary associations, 288–290. See also ethnic networks; ethnic socialization; institutions Hungary: in communist era, 1, 87–8, 109; and European integration, 163, 368, 369–70, 370n11; in Habsburg Empire, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41–43, 61, 67, 92; in interwar era, 47–49, 50, 74, 74n71, 78–79, 98; medieval and early modern, 57–58, 60–61, 89–90; migration of Transylvanian Hungarians to, 163n53, 174, 187–88, 200–201, 297–98, 298n78, 318–19, 326–32, 326n, 327n19, 369–70, 369n9, 371; as nationalizing state, 42–43, 61–62, 63–67, 92, 95, 102–5; Romanian national movement in, 40, 40n28, 43, 61–62, 66–67nn42–45, 67–68, 71, 92, 95–96, 95n22, 96n24; and Transylvanian Hungarians, 4, 87–88, 88n129, 125–26, 126n20, 150, 269, 275, 290, 290n54, 291–92, 327–28, 327n20, 328n22, 350–55, 368; during World War II, 76, 79–80 Iancu, Avram 142; statue of, 101n41, 142, 143n82, plate 13 Iliescu, Ion, 124n18, 149, 339, 348n indexical expressions, 231, 231n54 individualism, 201–2; methodological, 10, 10n23 and 24 industrialization: in Cluj, 111–15, 174, 177, 179–80, 182–83, 367, plates 19a–b in communist Romania, 85, 85n120, 87

434

INDEX

institutions, 265–300, 359; and ethnic reproduction, 148, 265, 266, 270–75, 277, 278, 280–83, 284–85, 292–94, 297–300, 368, 372–73; and nationalism, 299–300, 359; and shaping of social relations, 271–72, 274–75, 277, 278–79, 281–83, 285, 287, 288–90, 295, 297, 300; and social segmentation, 266–7, 267n, 270, 270n6, 297. See also associations; churches; ethnic enterprise; Hungarian world; media; schools interethnic interaction, 301–15, 301nn1 and 4; and avoidance norm, 307–9; and choices between ethnically framed alternatives, 311–14; conflict and disagreement in, 303–7; joking and teasing in, 309–11; nominal and experiential senses of, 301–3, 314–15; intermarriage, 174–75, 196–97, 279n26; and assimilation, 275, 275n19, 298–99, 370–72, 370nn14–15; ethnicization of interaction in, 303, 303n, 304–6, 308, 308n, 310, 311–14. See also ethnic endogamy interviews, 379–81 Iron Guard, 75 irredentism. See nationalist politics, and territorial revisionism Islam, 277, 38n24 Jászi, Oszkár, 68, 68n47 Jews, 17, 39, 98n32, 102, 108n79, 278n23, 369n10; and antisemitism, 50, 73n66, 75, 78–80, 78n86, 102n47, 103–5; assimilation of, 42–43, 65–66, 78, 78n87; and Communist Party, 81n100, 106; ghettoization and deportation of, 79–80, 80n95, 85, 105, 107n77; in urban economy, 45n46, 50, 85n119, 104–5, 283n38, 367n. See also antisemitism; towns, nationalization of

joking and teasing: about politics and politicians, 334, 334n3, 339, 341–43, 344–45, 350; in interethnic interaction, 181, 306, 308, 309–11 Joseph II, 35, 36, 37 Kincses, Elo˝d, 131–32, 135n45 Kosovo, 162n149 language, 239–264; as criterion for ethnic nationality, 14–15, 239, 239n2; as cue to ethnicity, 216, 218–221, 223–24; embodied experience of, 216, 241, 255–57, 264, 359; and ethnopolitical contention, 35–37, 39–50, 61, 64–67, 72–74, 84–85, 99, 99n34, 117–18, 123–25, 127–33, 146–51, 152–53, 153n112, 158–59, 239–40, 239n3, plates 5a, 5c–d; and hegemony, 242, 242n14; and interaction among strangers, 218–20, 243–46; marked and unmarked, 243, 243nn15–16, 273–74, 287, 300; in mixed company, 251–58; in public places, 246–51; as site of interactional friction, 239–264 passim; as vehicle for ethnicity, 216, 239–242, 243–261 passim, 262–64, 359, 362. See also bilingualism; Hungarian language; language choice; Romanian language language choice, 242n13; and code-switching, 175, 253–54, 255–56, 256n34; and comfort in speaking, 241, 255–57, 286; ethnopolitical significance of, 239n3; and exclusion, 251–54, 256, 258, 263, 286; in interaction among strangers, 243–46; in mixed company, 175, 251–58, 286; in mixed marriages, 312n17, 313–14; norms and expectations concerning, 218, 219–20, 240–41, 243–58, 243–44n18, 245n20, 251, 251nn24–25, 251n25, 254n32;

INDEX in public places, 246–51. See also bilingualism; code-switching; language language ideology, 240–41, 244–45, 246, 261–62, 261–62n43 language mixing, 259–62 language policing, 178–79, 182, 245, 246n21, 247–50, 257–58, 262–63; intra-ethnic, 229n51, 256, 260–62 language purism, 261–62, 261n43 language repertoires, change in, 99, 99n33, 116, 240, 240n8 Latvia, 202n28, 348n24, 369n10 L’viv, 43n41 Ma˘na˘s¸tur, 115, 115n, 183 Matthias Corvinus, 96, 100, 306, 306n11; statue of, 3, 96–97, 96n26, 97n27, 99–100, 100nn38–39, 103, 108, 108n80, 138–39, 140–41, 142–44, 143n82, plates 2b, c, e, 12, 16a–b media, 290–95; as instrument of ethnic reproduction, 292–94; and nationalism, 129–131, 290–92. See also institutions memory and commemoration, 96–97, 96n24, 99, 130–31, 138, 140–42, 140n66, 142n76, 146n89, plates 4, 6a, 10, 12–15, 16d. See also national holidays; plaques; statues migration, 316–32, plate 22; and citizenship, 321–26; and cross-border petty trading, 200, 204; as economic strategy, 200–201, 316–21; of ethnic affinity, 326–32, 327n19, 369n10; ethnicization of, 318–19, 323–26, 328–32; and ethnodemographic change in Cluj, 98, 102, 105, 107–8, 111–16, 297–98, 318–19, 366n4, 367, 368–70, 369nn8–9, 371–72; experiential centrality of, 189, 316–20; forced, 38–39, 38n24, 51–52, 51n65, 52n66, 76–78, 85n122, 369; of Transylvanian Hungarians to Hungary, 163n53, 174, 187–88, 200–201,

435

297–98, 298n78, 318–19, 326–32, 326n, 327n19, 369–70, 369n9, 371 minority rights, 51, 55, 126, 368, 372n19; international models of, 349–50, 371; League of Nations treaties on, 49–50, 75; limits of, 371–73 Moldavia, 32, 45n45, 62n19, 80, 234–37, 348 Moldova, 14, 14n36, 135n47, 328n21 Musil, Robert, 146, 358 names, 102n47, 221n33; as cue to ethnicity, 154–55, 176, 190, 201, 218, 220–21, 220n32, 313; as instruments of nationalization, 54, 64, 95n20, 99, 103, 110, 140, 292–93. See also street names Napoca, 89, 100n37, 109–10 nation: civic understanding of, 122, 122n9; ethnocultural and state-framed understandings of, 14–15, 27–28, 27n2, 36; medieval and early modern understanding of, 36, 57–60, 58n5, 90; modern understanding of, 35–36, 58–59, 271n10; and state, 14–15, 27–30; reproduction of, 363–64, 363n, 372–73; as transborder ethnocultural community, 14–15, 327–28, 327n20, 332 national anthems, 122, 127, 137, 143, 222n39, 281, 327, 359 national colors, 137, 216n19, 222–23, 222nn38–39, 327n20, 340–42, plates 4, 6–8, 10; as instrument of nationalization, 141–42, 141n73, 145–46, 358, plates 1–3, 5 national holidays, 222, 314n, 359–60; Hungarian, 130–31, 137, 145n27, 280–81, 327, 327n20, plate 4; Romanian, 140–43, 140n66, plate 10 national question, 27–30 National Salvation Front, 121n7, 124, 124n18, 149 national self-determination, 43, 47, 47n51, 51, 54, 81n100 national symbols. See memory and commemoration; national anthems; national colors; national holidays; plaques; statues

436

INDEX

nationalism: banal, 168, 273, 363; and ethnicity, 14; interactional emergence of, 375–79; methodological, 24n2; multiple forms of, 6–7, 357–60; as seen from afar, xiii–xiv, 13–14, 167, 358, 360; and the social sciences, 10, 10n22; temporal dimensions of, 360–61; as way of seeing, 30, 35–36, 40n28, 59, 60, 151n106, 208n2, 358, 360. See also ethnicity nationalist politics: and archaeology, 103, 103n51, 141, 143–44, plate 14b; and claims of ethnic demography, 40–41, 40n30; and claims to “historic rights,” 34–35, 40–41, 40n30; in Cluj, 1–6, 89, 92, 95–107, 109–10, 112–13, 122–23, 127–28, 133–61; and cultural homogenization (see nationalization); in East Central Europe, 21–55; economic aspects of, 46n47, 70–72, 87, 87n124, 111–113, 283, 284–85; and everyday political talk, 304–05, 307–09, 333–35 passim; in Habsburg Empire, 30–43; and historiography, 23–24, 56n1, 57, 83, 89; popular response to, 3–4, 5–6, 16, 142–46, 150–51, 157, 157n133, 160–61, 167, 339–55, 358, 362–63, 365; in Târgu-Mures¸, 128–36; and territorial revisionism, 48–49, 55, 55n75, 74, 74n71, 101, 136, 371–72n18, 378–79; in Transylvania 59–88, 122–26, 160–63, 371–72; and urban-rural differences, 39, 50, 70, 76, 85–87. See also ethnicity; nationalization nationality: as census category, 46n48, 65n35, 98n32, 102, 102n45, 108n79, 278n23; and citizenship, 14–15, 213, 231, 328–31;

ethnocultural, 12, 53, 210, 211, 213, 239, 239nn1–2, 327; principle of, 24, 28, 43, 45, 47 nationalization: in Cluj, 91–105, 109–18, 138–46, 366–73, plates 2, 3, 5, 12–15, 16d; European integration and, 368–70; in Habsburg Empire, 36–37, 39–43; in interwar East Central Europe, 43–50; in Northern and Western Europe, 37n21; in postcommunist Eastern Europe, 369n10; of towns, 50, 70–71, 75–76, 85–87, 85n122, 87nn123–124, 110, 201n26, 283n38, 366–67, 369n8; in Transylvania 60–62, 63–73, 75–80, 82–85, 87, 87n124, 88, 361, 366–73 nationalizing states, 45–46 nation-state, 16, 29, 60–61, 63, 68, 68n47, 125, 168n2, 211, 240, 246, 316, 360–61; invisibility of ethnicity in, 19, 359, 363; putative decline of, 54, 54n73, 367–68, 372, 373; and reproduction of national culture, 370n14, 372 NATO, 126, 163n153 Nazism, 50–51 Oradea, 104, 159, 160, 369n9 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, High Commissioner on National Minorities, 126, 126n22, 148n95 Ottoman Empire, 29–30, 32, 38–39, 38n24, 60–61, 62–63, 90 Party of Romanian National Unity, 4n7, 124–25, 136, 309, 346n plaques, as instruments of nationalization, 100, 100n39, 108, 138, 140–43, 145–46, plates 12, 15 plural societies, 267n Poland, 51–52, 52n66, 54, 200; as nationalizing state, 45–46, 45nn44–46 political talk, everyday, 304–6, 307–9, 333–55; cynical forms of, 334, 334n3, 351–52; differing Hungarian and Romanian forms of, 338;

INDEX and distance from politics, 334–36, 339, 341–42, 344–45; ethnicization of, 338; occasions for, 333–34 politicians: disparagement of, 334–36, 339, 341–42, 344–45; seen as fomenting ethnic tensions, 335–36 postnationalism, 54, 367–68, 370, 373 preoccupations, 191–206; with getting ahead, 201–5; with getting by, 192–201, 195n5, 197n16, plate 21 public administration, minority language use in, 152–53, 152n109, 153n112 Quebec, 270n7, 372 Reformation, 58, 90–91, 90nn6–7 region, and ethnicity, 231–37 religion, and ethnicity, 3n3, 95n20, 102n45, 232, 239n1, 278, 278n23. See also churches Renner, Karl, 41n31 Roma, 18–19, 18n44, 19n48, 125n19, 132, 198n17, 217n22, 238, 329n25; and census, 18, 18n45, 152n107, 154n117, 156, 156n129, 159; and migration, 323–25; stigmatization of, 205, 233–34, 233n60, 323–25, 324n14, 330; violence against, 161n148 Romania, 1, 32, 43, 53–54, 79–80; and European integration, 126, 163, 163n53, 368, 369–70, 370n11; everyday economic strategies in, 197–205; image of, 321–26; inequalities of wealth in, 205–06, 375–79; migration from, 159, 200, 316–18; as nationalizing state, 45–46, 45nn44–46, 68–76, 97–101; postcommunist resurgence of ethnopolitical contention in, 122–27, 135–36, 135n47, 161–63; and Romanian national movement in Hungary, 67, 67n45; during World War II, 79–80, 102. See also Romanian communist regime

437

Romanian Communist Party, 81–83; ethnic composition of, 81n100, 83, 106, 106n72 Romanian communist regime: establishment of, 80–83, 105–9; fall of, 119–22; nationalist turn of, 56n1, 82–87, 83n111, 88, 109–10; and policy of heavy industrialization, 85, 85n120, 87, 111–13; and policy of homogenization, 83, 83n114; and Soviet nationality policy, 80–82, 108–9; weakness of dissident opposition to, 119, 119n1 Romanian language, Hungarians’ knowledge of, 99, 99n33, 175, 178, 181, 185–87, 219–20, 240, 241, 244–45, 244n19, 255, 259, 274n16, 294–95, 295n70. See also bilingualism; language choice Romanian national movement (pre-World War I), 32, 40, 40n28, 43, 59–60, 60n12, 61–63, 62n19, 66–67nn42–45, 67–68, 71, 92, 95–96, 95n22, 96n24 Romanian schools (in Hungary), 64, 78, 91n11, 103; and ethnic reproduction, 66, 66–67n42, 270n7, 278. See also schools; universities Romanov Empire. See Russian Empire Russia and Russians, 55n75, 177, 195n4, 197n13, 198n14, 348n Russian Empire, 29–30, 32, 34n14, 39, 43, 63 Russian minority, 369n10 Saxons, 57–59, 61n16, 65n33, 66n41, 85n122, 90–91, 90n7, 91n8. See also Germans schools, 269–77; choice of, 180–81, 225, 272–73, 275–76, 275nn18–19, 276n, 297, 312, 312n20, 370n14; and ethnic reproduction, 66, 66–67n42, 270–75, 270n7, 271n9, 277, 278; as instruments of nationalization, 42, 64, 64n28, 72–73, 73nn66–67, 83–85, 275–77, 278;

438

INDEX

schools (continued) and social reproduction, 269–70, 270n6. See also Hungarian schools; Romanian schools; universities Scotland, 29n8 Serbia, 32, 43, 46, 162n149, 368 Serbs, 38n24, 40, 43, 46, 46n48, 48, 54n70, 162n151, 239n1 Slovaks, 38n24, 40, 42–43, 46–47, 46n48, 47n50, 52, 66 Slovakia, 368, 368n7 Soviet army, and occupation of Cluj, 107n77 Soviet Union, 51, 51n63, 51–52n65, 52, 79, 80–82, 80n95, 83, 85n122, 105–7, 107n77, 239n3; administration of northern Transylvania, 80, 80n98, 105–6; disintegration of, 54, 54n73, 135n47, 369n10; nationality policy of, 53, 81–82, 84, 108–9, 299 statues, as instruments of nationalization, 96–97, 99–100, 100nn37–39, 101n41, 103, 108n80, 138–39, 141, 142, 142n76, 143n82, plates 13, 14a, 14c, 16d. See also Iancu, Avram; Matthias Corvinus; plaques Status Law, 126, 156, 156n129, 350–55, 368; and everyday understandings of ethnicity, 338–39, 353–55 stereotypes, 218, 232–35, 244n19, 321–25, 324n14. See also commonsense knowledge; stigmatization stigma, 235–36, 321–22n12; and citizenship, 321–26, 328–31; and Roma, 205, 233–34, 233n60, 323–25, 324n14, 330 street names, 99, 103, 108–9, 140, 289, 292–93, 293n63. See also names symbolic geography, 99, 100–1, 142, 321–22n12 Szabadság (local Hungarian newspaper), 123n12, 150–51, 155–56, 273n14, 291, 292–94. See also media

Szekler region, 68, 73, 82, 112, 112n90, 125, 134, 135–36, 185, 187, 243–44n18, 268, 366n4, 370n15, 371–72n18 Szeklers, 57–59, 232, 232n55 Târgu-Mures¸, 150, 150n103, 159, 160, 177, 228; ethnic violence in, 5, 128–36, 160–62. See also ethnic violence Timis¸oara, 119–20 To˝kés, László, 119–20, 120n3, 124, 143, 150n103, 280, 305–6 tourism, and nationalism, 289, 289n52 towns: as ethnically distinct from countryside, 39, 50, 76, 85–86, 283n38, 366–67, 367n; nationalization of, 50, 70–71, 75–76, 85–87, 85n122, 87nn123–124, 110, 201n26, 283n38, 366–67, 369n8 transnationalism, 316, 367–68, 369, 373 Transylvania, 17–18, 56–88; as borderland, 23, 56; communist era in, 80–88; in Dualist Hungary, 63–67; early history of, 56–60; ethnic and religious composition of, 57, 58–59, 65–66, 70–71, 75–76, 78–79, 85–87, 90, 278, 366–67, 368–70, 373; historiographic controversy over, 56n1, 57, 89; industrialization in, 85–87; in interwar Romania, 68–76, 68n49; nationalist politics in, 59–88, 122–26, 160–63, 371–72; nationalization of, 60–62, 63–73, 75–80, 82–85, 87, 87n124, 88, 361, 366–73; Revolution of 1848 in, 60–63; Romanian national movement in, 59–60, 60n12, 61–62, 62n19; in World War II, 76–80 Transylvanian, as quasi-ethnic category, 234–35, 234n62, 237 Transylvanism, 75, 75n73 trust, 198n17; and ethnic networks, 285, 286n45 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 125, 125n19, 153n112, 334–35, 339, 339n12

439

INDEX Ukraine, 14, 59–60n11, 202n28, 251n25, 261–62n43, 348n24, 368, 369n10 Ukrainians, 40, 43n41, 45n46, 51–52, 152n109 Union Square, 1–3, 96, 99–100, 138–44, 365, plates 2, 11a. See also Matthias Corvinus; national colors; plaques United States, 8–9, 28n4, 284, 370n12 universities: Babes¸-Bolyai University, 109, 147–50, 148nn94–95, 149, 149n100, 288n51; Bolyai University, 81, 83, 109, 147; and Hungarian world, 147–48, 148n94, 149n100, 288–89, 288n51;

nationalist struggles over, 92, 95, 95n22, 98, 98n31, 103–4, 109, 123–24, 146–51, 151n104. See also schools Vatra Româneasca˘, 124, 130, 133, 133n41, 136 Wales, 29n8, 254n32 Wallachia, 32, 62–63, 62n22 World War I, 43, 330, 352 World War II, 38n24, 49, 50–51, 51–52n65, 80n97, 162, 162n151 Yugoslavia, 5, 43, 46–47, 51n63, 52, 53–55, 54n70, 80n97, 135n47, 162, 162n151, 239n1, 348n24, 369n10