Rumunia w poszukiwaniu miejsca
Romania in Search of Its Place

Romanian Identity and the Problem of “Europeanness” in the Discussions of Romanian Intellectuals at the End of the Twentieth Century (A Review of Possible Strategies)

Author(s): Ivan Zhyhal
Subject(s): Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Romania; intellectuals; Eastern Europe; 1989; symbolic geography
Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to the issue of Romanian identity and the symbolic geography of Romania after 1989. Considering Europe as a figure of imagination and a semantically loaded concept which became the starting point for all other histories, the author refers to Eastern and Central Europe as concepts generated by the European gaze. If Eastern Europe was generated by the Western need to invent almost a doppelganger to maintain its own identity, then in turn the East European inferiority complex, combined with the transition of much of Eastern Europe to Soviet control in 1945, led to the idea of Central Europe, designed to free itself from Soviet influence and emphasise its belonging to the West. The fall of the communist regime in Romania in 1989 entailed the need for local intellectuals to rewrite Romanian symbolic geography in a way that would put the country in its proper place on the European map. To this aim, Romanian intellectuals have proposed a number of intellectual models aimed at emphasising Romanian Europeanness, primarily referring to the idea of Central Europe.

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