The book is a comparative analysis of the ideological constructions of national specificity in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Studying the growing infatuation with ""national essence"" it seeks to understand the radicalization of nationalism in East Central Europe in connection with the shift of the notions of historicity and temporality.Trencsényi provides a contextual analysis of the symbolic resources and available ideological references that were used for creating these discourses in the respective countries. While focusing on the interwar period when these conceptions became ce.
The article is an overview of the development of Hungarian cultural-political discourses focusing on the notion of 'national specificity' during the nineteenth century. It seeks to link these conceptual developments to the transformation of the underlying vision of historicity and that of the socio-political context of nation-building, caused by such collective experiences as the 'national revival' or the 1848-49 Revolution. It argues that in the process practically all the key ideological stances changed their content. While at the beginning of the nineteenth century conservatives were supra- and often anti-nationalist, by the end of the century they developed their own specific 'national conservatism'. Similarly, the relationship of liberalism and nationalism underwent a fundamental reconfiguration, and by the end of the period the 'liberal nationalist' ideology practically disintegrated. Reconstructing the complex conceptual itinerary of the notions of national specificity thus serves as a litmus test for grasping the ways Hungarian national discourse changed over the century and also offers a conceptual framework for a broader trans-regional analysis of romantic and post-romantic nationalism.
This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international "market of ideas" had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceauşescu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between "Westernizers" and "autochthonists," accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.
