Puritatea naţiunii. Discursul oficial între imperativele războiului şi „ontologia etnică” (1940-1941)
The Purity of the Nation. Official Discourse between Wartime Ojectives and “Ethnic Ontology” (1940-1941)

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the relationship between the official discourse of the Antonescu regime (1940-1944) and the rise of racial thinking, promoted by eugenicists, medical professionals and intellectuals. Ion Antonescu promoted a new type of nationalist discourse in order to stabilize the country and mobilize the citizens in support of his dictatorship. Its representatives pursued racial discrimination towards ethnic or religious minorities to consolidate the state. The article analyzes the role of the state in the implementation by Romanian racial thinkers of their ideas about the biological improvement of the nation, during the National-Legionary regime and after the Iron Guard was removed from power. The contribution examines the perceived dangers towards the nation, the main ideas and measures proposed to protect Romanian ethnicity and combat demographic decline. It assesses how “modernization” models from Germany and Italy were adapted to interwar social and demographic development in Romania. The outcome of such processes and discourses was a national identity based on “integral nationalism”, which included a biological perspective founded on the exclusion of certain minorities and those deemed social and economically undesirable.

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