The Imagining of National Spaces in Interwar Romania. The Case of Geopolitics
The Imagining of National Spaces in Interwar Romania. The Case of Geopolitics

Summary/Abstract: In interwar Romania, there was a large and important coming together of various intellectual disciplines under the sign of romanticism and reactionary modernism, a massive scientific, intellectual and cultural redefinition and reworking of different disciplinary canons. The polemics on the topic of who held the right criteria for defining the “real,” the “authentic” national-identity, national spaces, national culture, etc. gained a central role. This paper is focused on the “representative biography” of Anton Golopentia, a Romanian sociologist and geopolitician strongly influenced by Hans Freyer’s sociology and philosophy of culture. Anton Golopentia’s work is used as a test case for understanding how the common interwar European “pool of ideas” is domesticated, adaptated and subverted at the periphery. The problematic of the “national” is central in Romanian interwar sociology. Sociology and geopolitics were understood as helping, in a neutral, “scientific” way, the state in the nation-building process through specific and applied knowledge. The national community was implicitly and surreptitiously constructed through scientific discourses, hidding, in the process, the diffuse ideology of the organic, “primordial” character of the nation.

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