Suchergebnisse

El sentido, la práctica, la denuncia y la utilidad del fraude electoral representan los puntos clave para la comprensión de la naturaleza del régimen político de Rumania después del año 1866. Este estudio analiza la aparente paradoja de la simultaneidad de la fuerte condena normativa y de la práctica sistemática de la corrupción electoral en los dos partidos políticos principales, y la explica a través del interés común que tenían tanto el rey como los partidos de consolidar su control sobre las instituciones representativas, sobre el Estado y su burocracia, propugnando al mismo tiempo un sentido moral de su común empeño en la modernización política. Evitando una condena moral de la corrupción, el artículo examina el papel social, la utilidad y la racionalidad de las prácticas discursivas y políticas que permitieron tanto la institucionalización pragmática de los partidos políticos como la legitimización normativa del nuevo estado.

The paper starts from the assumption that 1866 – the year a foreign prince is in-vited to the Romanian throne and a constitutional government is introduced - elevates to the rank of state ideology the discourse of the "unitary nation" that immediately becomes the hegemonic narrative. As early as 1866, at the dawn of mass politics in Romania, the parliamentarians compensate for the late and weak statehood (with internal challenges and separatist movements, and difficult international acknowledgment) with the patriotic rhetoric of national brotherhood and the exclusivist appraisal of "Romanianness". The first part examines the foundations of the new regime, by drawing comparisons with Greece. In May-June 1866 Romania condenses Greece's experience from March 1844 to March 1864. In both cases, the foreign prince from a European royal family (respectively Karl Ludwig von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Otto von Wittelsbach, Prince of Bavaria) is considered the price to pay in order to gain the foreign powers' protection and their support for obtaining political autonomy, if not yet independence from the Porte. Some of the main questions asked are: to what extent the new prince is ready to accept de facto and de jure the contractual nature of the Constitution? What is the meaning of the "Constitution" for both the parliamentarians and Charles I (the name taken by the von Hohenzollern as ruling Prince of Romania)? Who is the holder of the pouvoir constituant in 1866? Why is the reference to the autochthonous constitutional tradition absent in 1866? How to explain the xenophobic arguments of the parliamentarians who oppose the foreign prince? The second part of the paper examines three of the first major pieces of legislation adopted during the first parliamentary session of 1866-1867 - on the new national currency, national day and coat of arms – in order to integrate the foreign Prince and his dynasty into the national narrative and imaginary, and to make visible the signs of state autonomy.

Dans les débats parlementaires roumains de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, la Belgique joue un rôle très intéressant, moins comme élément central de la comparaison: sur ce terrain, la France, "soeur la tine", et l'Angleterre, "mère" du constitutionnalisme, peuvent difficilement être contestées. La Belgique représente surtout un modèle important pour la Roumanie dans ses essais de développement et de modernisation, en un mot, d'occidentalisation. Cette contribution examine les raisons de la comparaison avec la Belgique dans un dossier de développement institutionnel majeur, à savoir le réseau des chemins de fer. La Belgique est un des instruments les plus utiles dans les arguments des députés roumains afin de soutenir leurs différentes positions sur la construction des chemins de fer. La comparaison avec la Belgique aide les parlementaires à donner expression à l'héritage saint-simonien, le plus souvent mâtiné de positivisme, qui fait figure d' "idéologie d'accompagnement" de l'aménagement territorial et urbain pendant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle roumain.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the debates in the Romanian Constitutional Assembly of 1866 concerning the article 7 of the Constitution that excludes non-Christians from political rights. It also examines the governmental regulations and the parliamentary questions to ministers on the discriminations and violence against the Jews during the years 1867-1869. The paper concludes that the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to acknowledge the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a given, rather than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. Citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. Furthermore, the paper holds that the parliamentarians' xenophobia and anti-Semitism is the expression of nationalism as the most modern way of understanding what binds a political community together, and not of medieval pogroms that oppose Christians and Jews on religious bases. The years 1866-1869 lay thus the basis for what was subsequently to become the more coherent and doctrinaire nationalist anti-Semitism that incorporated anti-Semitism into the very nature of being a Romanian and into the Romanian national identity itself. The paper aims at drawing more nuanced conclusions about the recently much-debated character of citizenship and nationhood in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. The article holds that the parliament is a site for political conflicts related to the process of nation-building and a privileged political space of production of the nation-state. Moreover, parliamentary discourse can be seen as an instrument of investigation of an epoch, the Parliament being both a symbolical and a historical site.

The article examines a few episodes during the 1866-1871 legislatures of the Romanian Parliament. The debate on the annual budget for 1867 represents a good opportunity for the members of the Parliament to define politics as a matter of opinion, with negative connotations, in opposition to the face-value and clearness represented by the mathematical percentages and figures. The latter ought to guide, in their opinion, good governance, which does not belong to the realm of politics. According to such a mental scheme, the members of both Chambers of the Parliament appear to be convinced that majoritarian politics and the fragmentation of the political parties must be utterly rejected in order to adequately realize representation. The difficulty of the Romanian members of the Parliament to define politics influences their difficulty to define their own role, namely the nature of political representation.

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The argument is that the Parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, the article attempts, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.

Mihail Kogălniceanu and Nicolae Bălcescu, historians, writers and politicians,
important actors of the revolution of 1848 in the Romanian Principalities, dedicated
much of their early historical writings to the justification of the nationstate.
Their main concern, common to the '48 generation across Europe, was to
answer to the most important question related to the process of nation building
and state building: "Who are we?", 1848 being for the Romanians the first moment
of the collective constitutional memory. The article contends that the two
historians retroactively applied to the past categories specific to the 19th century,
the past itself being a weapon and guide for the future. Both Kogălniceanu
and Bălcescu submitted the political project of nation-state building to a archeology
identity called upon to justify.

Sociologue et politiste, formé en Roumanie, directeur de recherche au CNRS, professeur à l'Université de Californie à Los Angeles, Mattei Dogan (1920-2010) a joué un rôle majeur dans le développement de la recherche comparative internationale en sciences sociales. Issu d'un colloque international organisé par la Fondation Mattei Dogan en coopération avec le New Europe College - Institut d'Études avancées de Bucarest, cet ouvrage collectif retrace les grandes étapes de l'itinéraire et de l'oeuvre interdisciplinaire de ce scientifique exceptionnel