Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (review)

The approach to nationhood and nationalism taken by Brubaker and his co-authors offers new perspectives on a familiar subject and, best of all, stirs thought. They use the perspectives and methods of historians and sociologists as they probe ethnicity, guided by Hobsbawm's dictum that although nationhood and nationalism are constructed from above, an understanding of these phenomena requires an analysis from below.¹ Politics, especially nationalist politics, and the role that it plays in manifestations of ethnicity, is the pervasive theme. It could not be otherwise given Transylvania as the locus for testing hypotheses. Long a borderland of ethnicities, it is an inspired choice. So is the authors' focus on Cluj, the modern capital of Transylvania, as a laboratory where the workings of ethnicity can be uncovered and the consequences analyzed.

The authors have divided their investigation into two parts. The first looks at nationhood and nationalism historically from above, examining the discourses of intellectuals and activists and placing the contemporary scene in a longer-term perspective. Brubaker and company are concerned mainly with developments since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when nationhood and nationalism began to dominate Transylvanian public life, and they describe successive contexts: the Habsburg Monarchy, Transylvania until the year 1918, Greater Romania between the World Wars, and the new nationalism of the Romanian Communist regime and of its successors after 1989. They are fair and balanced in their judgments of events and the motives of elites. Of particular interest are the chapters on Cluj between 1918 and the present, which trace its transition from a predominantly Hungarian city to one that was 80 percent Romanian.

Part 2 is a case study of ethnicity at the daily level, an inquiry into the nature of nationhood and nationalism from below, from the perspective of ordinary people. Such an approach, the authors argue, avoids the distortions created when nationalist politics are observed from above and when the ideas and pronouncements of elites are taken as true expressions of the whole community. To understand how ethnicity works, they treat it as a "perspective on the world" and as a "way of acting in the world" rather than as a "thing in the world." Their primary sources of data are the ordinary residents of Cluj (Clujeni), and their topics are habitual preoccupations, language, institutions, and interactions between Hungarians and Romanians (as individuals, not as categories). Their favored procedure is observation rather than the imposition of structured discussions and formal questionnaires on their Hungarian and Romanian hosts. They conclude that ethnicity is irrelevant most of the time in the day-to-day existence of Clujeni.

In the final chapter, which returns to the starting point of politics, they reach a similar conclusion: Clujeni in their everyday lives are little interested in politics, let alone nationalist politics. Such a finding raises fundamental questions about the strength of ethnicity generally outside elite circles. It will require scholars concerned with earlier periods to re-examine the development of national consciousness and national movements.

This book is an indispensable contribution to the study of modern nationalism to which theorists, researchers, historians, and social scientists will have to refer. If the authors had chosen another Transylvanian city or a city elsewhere for scrutiny, the results might have been different in the details. But the prime importance of their undertaking lies in an illuminating approach to ethnicity with the widest possible application.