Romanian Nation-formation in Transylvania: The Stages, Seventeenth Century to 1914
Romanian Nation-formation in Transylvania: The Stages, Seventeenth Century to 1914

Summary/Abstract: The origins of nations and the emergence of nationalism and national movements have been the subject of scholarly, and sometimes unscholarly, attention since the nineteenth century. At the theoretical level the debate about the nature and role of nation became especially sharp in the second half of the twentieth century, as modernists boldly challenged traditional conceptions. New explanations for the appearance of nations and their character and new estimates of their longevity held that they were constructs founded upon economic and social realities specific to the modern age. Such arguments clashed with the certainties of the so-called primordialists and perennialists about the age-old existence, even the permanence of nations in human society. Still another body of scholars―the ethno-symbolists―proposed what might be called a third way of approaching the matter. They emphasized historical and cultural links to the past, but at the same time they accepted the essential modernity of nations.

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