Politics of the Past: the Instrumentalization of Nicolae Iorga’s Memory in the Romanian Parliament (1990-2000)
Politics of the Past: the Instrumentalization of Nicolae Iorga’s Memory in the Romanian Parliament (1990-2000)

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to shed some light on how Nicolae Iorga, one of his country’s most important modern intellectual, was remembered by elected officials in the Romanian Parliament in the first post-communist decade. Through a qualitative analysis of parliamentary speeches and contextualisation, we look at how his legacy was used in a variety of manners by politicians acting as agents with quite different agendas. Most of the members of Parliament who engaged in memory politics in Iorga’s case were representatives from the governing party FSN/FDSN and the two ultranationalist parties, PUNR and PRM. Two main patterns emerged in the discourses that made reference to Iorga in this first decade: on the one hand, discourses of collective victimhood by exploiting the historian’s violent death and externalizing the blame, and on the other hand, discourses of xenophobia and antisemitism. Overall, the politics of memory of Iorga in the 1990s did not differ significantly from the national-communist narrative of the late communist decades.

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