More than a handful of authors have made a lasting contribution to the study of nationalism and ethnicity – once. Rogers Brubaker has done so several times over the past quarter of a century. His Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) and Nationalism Reframed (1996)^[1] come to mind, but his important contribution on the institutionalization of nationality in the USSR in Theory and Society (1994)^[2] also deserves mention. Many a researcher’s understanding of the German ethnically defined, objective concept of the nation in contrast to a French social-contract type of nation is based on Brubaker’s study, even though recent empirical studies have nuanced his juxtaposition and underlined that both are stereotyped. His “triadic nexus” stuck, and his warning against the fallacy of confusing “nation” as a category of reality and a category of analysis certainly outlive his attempt to establish the neologisms “nation-ness” and “nationhood” in academic jargon.
Unlike most scholars, Rogers Brubaker tried his hand at rather different genres – comparisons on the level of nation-states, theoretical studies such as Ethnicity without Groups (2004)^[3] as well as a case study on the level of one town. His studies are typically highly relevant for specialists in the field, but readable for students as well. Apart from the somewhat dated emphasis on the contrast between objective and subjective concepts of the nation, the first chapter of Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town is a perfect concise introduction to state and nation building in Europe for a graduate seminar.
In the stale debate on nationalism, Rogers Brubaker and John Breuilly are classified as empiricists. Living up to that reputation, Brubaker has opted to study and exemplify his main arguments on “ethnic engineering” and the ongoing construction of nations in a hotspot of nationalist politics in post-communist Eastern Europe, the Transylvanian town of Cluj-Napoca in Romania. Other hotspots such as Sarajevo, Mitrovica, or Tetovo may have seen more ethnic violence, but the reign of Gheorghe Funar of the rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Hungarian Greater Romania Party as mayor of the city (1992–2004) provides a case in point. In a collective effort to analyze nationalism and ethnicity in the multiethnic city of Cluj, Brubaker’s mission is to confute the widely held assumption that nationalism and violence are synonymous. Thus, he sets out to ask the empirical question: how and to what extent does ethnicity factor into politics and society in this city? Evidently, no ethnic configuration can be properly understood without knowledge of the past, or of the accumulated perceptions of the “other” and the histories of conflict and shared interests. The book sidesteps the much-debated issue of the relative importance attributed to the multiethnic past as a historical reality in contrast to historical myths and ethnic stereotyping.
Next, Brubaker and his co-authors use Romanian and Hungarian sources as well as English and German studies to demonstrate that both contesting nations in a modern sense emerged no earlier than the late 18th century, with the 1848 revolution as a major watershed. The multilayered shift from “natio” referring to a privileged group in society to “nation” as an ethnic, horizontal community is presented convincingly and without too much theoretical ado. Along the lines of his previous studies, Brubaker highlights the reactive character of nationalism, the interaction of a nationalizing state, a minority, and a homeland (“triadic nexus”). Transylvania is a case in point for the role of ethnic entrepreneurs too, although the subtle story also suggests that the unfolding escalation of nationalist action and reaction was only partly intentional. Even radical programs of nationalization, moreover, often failed to achieve their objectives, for example, the eradication of Hungarian education in Romania’s interwar Transylvania. As much as the authors implicitly object to ideas about grand conspiracies of Romanianization (or Magyarization for that matter), they elegantly avoid moral judgments or siding with the “victims” of these structural processes. Typically, even anthropological studies will never get beyond tentative or partial explanations of individual behavior. National resistance or enhanced identification with one’s ethnic kin is not the only and probably not even the most common reaction to nationalizing state. Some may tacitly accept assimilation, whereas others prioritize other advantageous factors of life in the city of Cluj over full political or social rights or nondiscrimination.
Zooming in on the city of Kolozsvár or Cluj-Napoca, the authors again present a historical overview from the Dacians to the end of communism. In the margins of the historical narrative, the authors again criticize and deconstruct some national myths, but unlike many post-modern constructivists they still feel that there is a historical story to be told beyond nationalist renderings and myth-making. Even national grand narratives are not created out of the blue and real-existing prehistories of cohabitation and conflict do help our understanding of current tensions. As noted, it is by and large left to the reader to weigh the impact of real-existing legacies versus passed-on perceptions and stereotypes. Neither on this issue nor on the intentionalism of ethnic engineers does the study have the ambition to provide “definitive” answers based on categorical theoretical positions.
Thus, the overall picture that emerges is ambiguous – even before World War I, nationalist energy concentrated on issues such as access to university education or the statue of Matthias Covinus, while government statistics suggest that the majority of Romanian Clujeni newly arrived from the countryside readily accepted the Hungarian language and culture and thus adapted or assimilated. Essentially, the Hungarian nationalizing state repeated the misjudgment of the Habsburg Monarchy, assuming that the national claims of the other could be ignored or repressed. In the interwar period, the Romanian nationalizing state repeated this misjudgment vis-à-vis the Hungarian minority. With each reversal of nation-state fortune, nationalism became more triumphalist and nationalization more pervasive in its consequences and less amenable to reconciliation. Without demonstrating an inevitable vicious circle toward nationalism as a dominant discourse, the historical narrative also circumvents the opposite fallacy of suggesting that nationalist mobilization is but political instrumentalization. At one-third of the book, the stage has been set for a more detailed assessment of nationalizing policies, rhetoric, and coping strategies in post-Ceauşescu Romania, Transylvania, and Cluj.
The authors take their time to properly contextualize the selected clashes between a nationalizing state and an assertive minority. More often than not, explanations and paradoxes are found in the details. In the euphoria of the 1989 revolution, for instance, Hungarians joined in with the Romanians singing an old revolutionary song, well knowing that it had originally been used in 1848 in protest against Hungarian domination. Similarly, answers to the more enigmatic question as to why the separation of Romanian and Hungarian schools was solved quite calmly in Cluj, but immediately got out of hand in nearby Târgu Mureş are to be found in almost contingent local factors and differences. In sum, the authors implicitly argue that whether or not national issues lead to open conflict and violence can be predicted at best on the basis of in-depth knowledge of the current situation and the historical backdrop. More likely, it will be explained ex post rather than predicted. In another case study, Funar’s “nationalization” of public space in Cluj is demonstrated with an excellent series of photographs of the omnipresence of the Romanian tricolor in the streets – not only on flags and street signs but also on streetcars, benches, flower beds, clothing, and playgrounds.
As the title promises, the second half of the book studies ethnicity as an everyday experience or, to be more precise, studies everyday life to find out the extent to which ethnicity factors into these experiences. Thus, the anthropological study is true to Brubaker’s claim (“nation-ness”) that “[e]thnicity is a perspective on the world, not a thing in the world” (P. 169). This highly original part of the book opens with portraits of normal Clujeni. Evidently, interviews are a highly malleable tool that may be used reveal interethnic love and tolerance or the pervasiveness of negative ethnic stereotypes and prejudices. Brubaker and his collaborators, however, use well-chosen interviews not as representative examples of a specific behavioral pattern, but to demonstrate, on the one hand, that ethnicity is omnipresent and, on the other hand, that it does not habitually lead to violence or types of exclusion or posing that would be unusual in any society without ethnic divides. By doing so, the authors identify a methodological fallacy common to many a study on nationalism – the bias resulting from the fact that a researcher who searches for ethnicity in his material is bound to find an abundance of it and overrate its impact on everyday life.
In the subsequent, more systematic chapters, the authors set about to elaborate on this omnipresence and normality of ethnicity in daily life by studying obvious categories of interaction among citizens as well as between citizens and state officials. The obvious choices include the use of languages in public, not only in official terms with respect to a citizen’s right to use his mother tongue in court or city hall but also in pubs and the workplace. The contemporary Hungarian minority is most acutely aware of the salience of ethnicity for them when public and state institutions and their ethnic coloring are concerned. The pros and cons of having separate institutions for each ethnic group are one of those ongoing everyday debates that inscribe ethnic identity in the self-perception of citizens. Typically, however, Cluj neither has a consociationalist set of parallel institutions, nor do Hungarians live spatially separated in their own neighborhoods of the city. Thus, Hungarians and Romanians are bound to meet and mix on a daily basis in shops, the workplace, sports events, railway stations or family gatherings.
The fact that “politics” is the title of the twelfth and last chapter is telling for the authors’ anthropological approach and for their message that research should pay more attention to the impact of ethnicity as a category in daily practice rather than being blinded by the rhetoric of political incendiaries. Even in this chapter, the focus is on citizens’ perceptions and assessments of the merits and motives of politicians and parties.
In line with the elegant and multilayered architecture of Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity, the conclusion actually is modest and balanced, but convincing: “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” (P. 358). And, “…one should not assume… that nationhood is always being reproduced as a pervasively relevant social category, or that banal nationalism ultimately reinforces nationalist politics” (P. 363). Most likely, Rogers Brubaker has again added a classic to the library on nationalism.