3. Challenging Thierry’s arguments

1v

KIN AND PEOPLE: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ROMANIAN ETHNOCENTRISM

1. GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATIONS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE AND POLITICS

The decades following the Second World War have demonstrated Western Europe’s desire to redefine some of the concepts on which its political identity was founded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as evidenced in academic research and the political arena. There is a keen desire to promote pluralistic discourse and to embed this within laws, coupled with an acknowledgement that despite these efforts, the disquieting echoes of the old ideologies of national identities still persist. On the other hand, Eastern Europe is faced with an even more complex problem, as its slow recovery from the grip of two distinct totalitarian systems impedes its progress towards social and political democracy. In the countries of this region, nationalistic discourse has filled the vacuum left by the collapse of Communism. These states are just beginning their journey towards integration into a European system whose aims are still inadequately grasped by the general population.

If Western Europe maintains social harmony through its stable political structures, Eastern Europe seeks to win over the masses by promoting ethnocultural values that promise to unify them. While in the West there is a desire to examine the key terms that have been used to define national identity through history, paying attention to the way they have evolved through particular social and political climates, Eastern Europe feels an impulse to resurrect bygone values that appear to oppose Communist ideology. While Western Europe possesses an appetite for confronting the realities of the past, Eastern Europe prefers to turn a blind eye to the darkest moments of its history.

There is one exception within the European Union, however: Greece. The country stays close to its Balkan roots and, on the question of identity, its rhetoric oscillates between state bureaucracy and a discourse that privileges race and blood ties. The latter emerges from its cultural history, founded on eighteenth-century German ideologies and promoted through its educational system over the past two centuries. There is also a political dimension to the revival of Hellas as imagined by eighteenth-century German academics, as it seemed an auspicious foundation of modern, European, Greek identity.1 Although the passage of time dulls human memory, there are certain patterns and structures that are inevitably absorbed within national consciousness through repetition and go on to deepen and enrich its culture.2 According to Reinhart Koselleck, history is fragmented, making it impossible to trace the exact origins of a people. When discussing the institutions and cultural identity of Greece, we must consider the differences between its ancient incarnation and the neo-Hellenic world, in order to avoid making tenuous arguments. Unfortunately, today in Greece there is ‘a centripetal cultural movement, and the historian only recognises a single point of departure, namely Athens in the fifth century BC’.3

This kind of cultural and historical reasoning is typical of Central and Eastern European states, for example, Romania. The cultural and political elite present their arguments as ‘indisputable’ facts. In a much-quoted article entitled ‘The Balkan Socrates and the Socratic Caragiale’, Alexandru Paleologu alleges that Greek philosophy, architecture and tragedy were ‘indisputably the foundation of European civilisation’, meaning that this civilisation has ‘Balkan roots’. This becomes a leitmotif throughout the article, reflecting not