Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930.

• Author: Solonari, Vladimir
• Position: Book Review

Irina Livezeanu

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000, xix, 340 pages

The publication of the paperback edition of Irina Livezeanu's book, first put out in hardcover by Cornell University Press in 1995, is a happy event for all those interested in the history of inter-war Romania and Eastern Europe. The book deals with the problems of inter-war Romania in the wider context of the post-First World War reconstruction of Eastern Europe. The discussion is informed by the contemporary debates on nationalism, nation-building and the fate of minorities, both historic and immigrant, in the era of nation-states.

Livezeanu's book focuses on the 1920s, which was not a particularly turbulent decade. In fact, compared to what followed in the 1930s, those ten years were reasonably peaceful and prosperous in Romania as well as in Eastern Europe as a whole. Although the Versailles system of nation-states carved out of the defunct Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires was not particularly stable from the start, neither the outbreak of a new war nor attempts at the forcible redrawing of national borders was inevitable. Only at the end of the decade, with the Great Depression, when the international banking community's and Western governments' efforts to restore the pre-war gold standard came to naught, did the situation drastically change. During the 1920s, financial orthodoxy was firmly believed to be the only conceivable economic policy, and it almost succeeded in getting the European economies back on the road to growth.

No wonder that in the 1990s, when Romanians began to search for the roots of their democratic culture, they turned to the 1920s as a golden age in comparison to everything that followed, which looked like, at best, a pitiful deviation. Romanians' political achievements in that period could be viewed as quite impressive. The 1923 Romanian Constitution guaranteed free and democratic elections and parliamentary government, land redistribution in favor of peasants was effected, the press was reasonably free and the judiciary more or less independent. There was a minimum of political stability with the traditional political class of the Old Kingdom (i.e., the Romanian state within the 1866 to 1918 borders) reestablishing its control, while permitting political opposition to function. For a country whose economy was devastated in the Great War and which saw its population and territory more than doubled as a result of the post-War...