Conclusions

I attempted to structure my study as an analysis of the new forms of manifestation of a historical conflict under the communist rule; and to explore the mechanisms of constructing self-identity and perceiving ethnicity in a communist system.

In analyzing the Romanian-Hungarian historical-rooted conflict, many students stressed the different cultural and religious identity of the two peoples. Dennis Deletant designated it as a lack of "synchronisation" "between the essentially Western cultural experience of Hungarians and essentially Eastern Orthodox experience of the Romanians, and the resulting divergence in behavioural values" #1;; G. Schophlin #2;, Trond Gilberg #3; and K. Jowitt #4; pointed out the different historical experience of the two peoples. In the process of nation building from the 19th century, the Hungarians from Transylvania participated as part of the Hungarian nation, whereas the Romanians from Transylvania participated, by their cultural movements, to the process of building Romanian national consciousness and national identity. These different political interests and orientations found their ground of conflict in Transylvania and generated a historical mythology that is overlapping and sometimes conflictual, provoking many political crises (see 1848, 1897, 1916-1919, 1940).

My study tried to answer the following question: how was such a historical conflict expressed under the communist rule?

I chose for analysing a particularly relevant period: the 1980's - one of the most dynamic and complex decade of the century: it began with the "hottest" phase of the Cold War inaugurated by 'Reagan Doctrine', continued in mid-1980's with the period of détente and finished with the collapse of communist system and the end of Cold War. The 'new thinking' promoted by M. Gorbachev and the denouncement of Breshnev Doctrine provoked the bankruptcy of supra-national authority, which unleashed the nationalist movements in Eastern Europe. Nationalism experienced both a resurgence and a regeneration, having as point of climax the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. I chose the Romanian-Hungarian conflict as a case-study to demonstrate that the nationalism of the 1980's has exhibited so many original and novel stimuli: a new demographic flux, the media revolution, new forms of alienation generated by the economic crisis, forced industrialisation and atomisation of society, and new environmental threats - as to constitute an essentially fresh phenomenon.

Firstly, I have tried to find the explanation for the new forms of the nationalist manifestation in the changes brought up by the communist regimes in Romania and Hungary. Both societies suffered dramatically social and political transformations. That is why the new nationalism and nation-state theories do not replicate their pre-World War II forms, but rather their exegesis and features are an epiphenomenon of the socialist rule (Verdery, 1991).

How did these developments influence Romanian-Hungarian relations? The answer required a broader discussion about the role of communist rule in unconsciously enforcing ethnicity.

In the section dedicated to the status of minorities under the socialist regime I have tried to emphasis the specificity of the communist social project, which can not be reduce to ethnicity. I extensively analysed the relevant example of the "systematisation plan", which was designed as the last stage of the creation of 'the Romanian unique working people", or, with a term coined by Claude Leford: the "People-as-one" #5;. This homogeneous body was designed to be without divisions: the elimination of all sources of antagonism was the very aim of the communist doctrine. This affected the way in which people perceived their identity. "In the so-called socialist world, there can be no other division than between the people and its enemies" #6;. Thus, communists created a culture that is very strong attuned to conflict, "conflictogenic", or "conflict producing". People perceived the world in black and white, a dichotomised universe split into "us" and "them". In my analysis, I argued that the Romanian-Hungarian enmity, as two cases of constructing self-identity by contrast, are antagonisms which legitimate each other, for the following reasons:

In a classical communist society, the "them", the enemy were mainly class enemy. But who were the "us" and "them" in the Romanian and Hungarian societies? As I had pointed out in the first chapter, in the Romanian case the national communist ideology considered the nation rather than the proletarian as the ideological basis, generating a major political shift: discontents were driven from inside to outside enemies (Verdery; Shafir). The class enemies were not the principal target anymore; political prisoners were released during the 1965-1971 liberalisation, and former convicted communist leaders were rehabilitated. The class enemies were replaced by outside the border enemies. The main target was, as I showed, the Soviet imperialism, and the anti-Soviet rhetoric legitimised the regime internally and externally. But in the late 1980's the Hungarian danger surpassed the Soviet one, for reason which I extensively explained and I now just enumerate:

- internally: the economic crisis and autarchy increased the coercive measures; the community redefined its borders by expelling its enemy: the dissidents, seen as the traitors of the nation. And we have seen that, for many historical reasons, ethnic Hungarians were the main potential dissidents; the public perception, as I showed, was rather ethnically; the Romanians who joined them were considered traitors of the national cause.

-externally: Hungary reacted at the worsening living conditions in Romania and infringements of human rights, which doubly affected the Hungarian community, as minorities are usually more vulnerable; the Hungarian pressure in the international institutions and its hostile media campaign gave arguments for the Romanian historical fear and mistrust of Hungarian intentions. In this perspective, I argued that the "scapegoating" explanation is oversimplifying: N. Ceausescu had a genuine fear of Hungarian intentions. The belief that there is an external conspiracy to discredit the country and perhaps even to dismember it transformed the counteracting of the Hungarian plans into the top-priority of the Romanian domestic and foreign policy in the late 1980's.

In the Hungarian case, the HSWP legitimised itself by different means: having as its first basis the external help (the Soviet Army, which stationed on the Hungarian territory), it gradually moved to an economic legitimisation offered by a remunerative system; convincing and compromising measures were preferred to coercive ones, expressed in the formula: "who is not with us is not against us". But the new national ideology promoted by the communists was under a constant pressure of the intellectual strata of the society. The 1956 revolution, and then the populist writers' ideology re-invigorated progressively traditional national themes such as: the pride in national culture and historical heritage, directly linked with the thesis of Hungarian cultural superiority and civilised mission in the Danubian Basin. Nostalgia played a major role in the national identity of Hungarians, as an addiction to idealised images of a simple and stable past conceived as a refugee from the decadent and chaotic present. The negative side-effects of the Kadar consumerism - one of the highest suicidal and alcoholic rates in the world, reinforced this cultural process. The utopian memory was represented by the St. Stephen's Kingdom and transmitted by a whole range of popular and cultural imagery: statues and monuments, maps, occasional celebrations and the Hungarian national master symbol, the crown. But in the Hungarian national identity the utopian element is simultaneous with the traumatic moment, symbolised by events like Mohacs, and in a much greater extend, by the Trianon Treaty, seen as a symbol of Hungary's dismemberment. My analysis tried to show how this traumatic/utopian cultural memory was transmitted in the 1980 in particular cultural and ideological forms, in an attempt to demonstrate the specific role played by Transylvania in this process. We saw the central role played by a utopian vision of the Transylvanian Principality from the 17th century in the creation of the "Hungarian Third Way", theorised by the populist writers. And the concern of the fate of Hungarians outside the borders of Hungary (which primarily meant, as I demonstrated, the Hungarians from Transylvania) was a catalyst of the re-emergence of the traditional Hungarian national identity. The discussion about the fate of Hungarians from Transylvania was becoming, in my opinion, a more general reflection of the fate of Hungarian nation in general, occasioned also by the return of the St. Stephan crown in 1978 from USA. Hungarians from Transylvania symbolised the fate of Hungarian nation: a superior culture under the burden of a backward state (a parallel with the Russian occupation was suggested), a part of the nation forced to suffer an unjust treatment by a Romanian national unitary state. The theme of the nation as an innocent victim martyred by foreign evil forces is common in Eastern European historiography. One example is the Romanian and Hungarian historiographies, which revealed atrocities committed in the Second World War as a traumatic experience.

All in all, I am arguing that by creating an enmity image in the late 1980's the Romanian became for Hungarians the 'them" needed to contrast their own identity: Romania became the great danger, as they menace the very existence of Hungarian minority from Transylvania and even Hungary's national security. N. Ceausescu became the perfect incarnation of the evil, the number one enemy of Hungary. This conclusion, based on many facts which I tried to show in the first chapters, is reinforced by a confidential survey of the Hungarian Institute for Mass Communications, which showed that in 1985 Romanians were the most unpopular nation in Hungary #7;. Post-communist events also supported this conclusion: the fall of N. Ceausescu provoked a genuine euphoria in Hungary, for which we can find rare precedents in Hungarian history; the trial of N. and Elena Ceausescu established a record for audience level on Hungarian TV.

This perspective is illuminating for defining the characteristics of the Romanian-Hungarian conflict in the 1980's: 1) It proved that the socialist policy reinforced ethnicity (Verdery) and produced an ethnicisation of the relationship between Romanians and Hungarians. People used to think in Hungarian terms, in Romanian terms, even when this was quite inappropriate. We have already took into accout Verdery's conclusion that the tightening of ethnic borders fulfilled a survival role for the Hungarian minority in an economy of shortage, similar with the secondary economy. I am also arguing that the minority issue was a cover for other phenomena and conflicts between both countries. The concern about the Hungarian minority from Transylvania was a kind of opposition to the communist regime, as it developed a parallel discourse on national identity than the official one. In Hungary, in the 1980's, to be liberal, especially in media, meant to write as much as possible about the fate of Hungarians abroad. An analysis of Magyar Nemet revealed that every daily issue in the period 1988-1989 contained news about the Hungarians from Romania. These phenomena contributed directly to the changes in Hungarian society. This is also true for the Hungarians from Transylvania: in their protests (see Ellenpontok, or other samizdat publications) the specific demands were mixed with liberal critics of the regime, and so being a form of fight against communism. Another relevant example present in my study is the ideological conflict between Budapest and Bucharest in the late 1980's. I already pointed out that Hungary became the leader of the reformist communist countries, and Romania a leader of the conservative countries. But this conflict took often the form of the historical recrimination or minority issues.

2) The second characteristic, in my view, is a change in the nature of the political discourse, especially in the official polemical speeches. Its primarily preoccupation was not the solving of practical problems, but the defining of the essence of national identity, and of the borders of the national community. The discourse became inclusive (see the statements of M. Szuros according to which Romanian citizens of Hungarian ethnicity were part of Hungarian nation), and so being perceived as a threat to international peace; or exclusive (see N. Ceausescu's statements of expelling the traitors of the nation, or the suspicion toward the Hungarian minority). The basis of these political discourses was morality rather than interests. The moralisation of the political speech is a common characteristic. The Hungarian propaganda claimed for international solidarity to its just cause of human rights defending against one of the harshest dictatorship in the world. On the other hand, N. Ceausescu pictured himself as the defender of the nation against an international conspirator plot of Hungarian inspiration.

To conclude, I consider that the manifestation of this historical conflict under the communist rule in the 1980's is a spectacular example of the identity crises suffered by local or ethnic communities in a period of global transformation of world politics, economy and environment. Ethnic identities seemed to follow national and international crisis, changes in governments and international scuffling of political alliances and militaries blocs.