The long shadow of past worlds? Persistent local identities and nationalizing discourses in post-WWI Transylvania
With the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the beginning of Romanian nation-state building in the Eastern parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary the issue of integrating smaller regions within a unitary state recurrently surfaced. Already during the short revolutionary period, local communities presented specific demands (return of property, redrawing of administrative boundaries) that were rooted in their history instead of being part of the larger national-social goals of the revolutions and the pattern of aligning discursively local or regional goals with the process and rhetoric of nation-building was prevalent in areas which had a tradition of some form of peculiarity before the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. Using these examples (among others Maramureş, Southern Banat, Zaránd/Zărănd county, District of Kővár/Chioar) my paper aims at revealing these long lasting identifications and their role within local society. While usually treated flexibly by local elites, they often served as a basis of informal political agreement which found its expression in public discourse too. Thus, a careful dissecting of these localist discursive tropes within the emerging national one is also a way to reveal patterns of integration.