Baar Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

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248 The Golden Age

attitude led to criticism on Kossuth’s part, to which Horv

ath responded

vehemently:

When I wrote an account defending the Compromise, I was aware that it would

not appeal to those who believe that our ancient liberties were buried with the

Compromise in 1867, as this reduced our country to an Austrian province.

Neither did I expect approval from those who try to steer our nation towards

self-aggrandisement and behave as if it was one of the most powerful states in

the world, on a par with England, Germany and France, as if there was no need

to tailor our politics to our particular strengths and circumstances, leading to a

sensible compromise.⁸⁸

Horv

ath endorsed the Compromise by pointing out that, in the context

of post-1848 Europe, the restoration of complete independence was even

more illusory than at any time in the previous centuries. He believed that,

if a state could gain greater prosperity in association with another one,

then that option must be taken into account. In relation to this, he asked

his readers to consider the Scottish example: although Scotland was a

ﬂourishing and inﬂuential part of Britain, it was not a state in itself.⁸⁹ His

refutation of the unrealistic demands for independence was substantiated

by a reference to Edgar Quinet’s view that ‘truth is a staple of nations

that have reached a mature stage, whereas ﬂattery, false promises and

delusion suit the stages of childhood and youth’, expressing his hope that

his own nation belonged to the former group.⁹⁰ Additionally, Horv

ath

couched his plea for pragmatism in terms of another beneﬁcial aspect

of the Compromise, a transparent regulation of rights and obligations.

Appealing to the historia magistra vitae tradition, he highlighted cases in

the course of Hungarian history when a reasonable compromise would

have been more advantageous for the nation, rather than insistence on

the unrealistic ideal of complete independence.⁹¹

ROMANIA: UNITED AND INDEPENDENT

Kog

alniceanu’s was a prime example of the politically motivated histo-

rian and, on both fronts, his principal concern was to provide historical

⁸⁸ Horv

ath, Kossuth Lajos ´ujabb leveleire, 2nd edn. (Pest, 1868), 1.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 86. ⁹⁰ Ibid., 96.

⁹¹ His main example was the R

oczi War of Independence in the early eighteenth century.

The Golden Age 249

justiﬁcation for the necessity of the uniﬁcation and, later, indepen-

dence of the two Danubian principalities. He endowed the Romanians

with illustrious ancestry through language, whilst drawing upon the

Roman heritage, which evoked respectability and prestige, to culturally

reorientate the Romanians from the Orthodox to the Latin world.

This transformation, also underlined by Kog

alniceanu’s relinquishing

of the Cyrillic alphabet in favour of Latin, was perceived as the restora-

tion of an ancient, normative condition after a long epoch of cultural

contestation.

Kog

alniceanu divides Romanian history into three fundamental

epochs: the ancient era from pre-historical times until the founda-

tion of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1290 and 1350

respectively; the medieval era, encompassing the history of principalities

until the beginning of the rule of the Greek Phanariote princes in

1716; and the modern era from 1716 onwards.⁹² Romanian historians

wrestled with a major obstacle when reconstructing continuities with

the national past, as they had to account for a dark millennium be-

tween the Roman withdrawal from Dacia in the third century and the

foundation of the medieval principalities. In addition to the inadequacy

of sources, they were confronted with an emerging hypothesis in the

eighteenth century which disputed the continuity of the Romanians

north of the Danube (in Transylvania) and suggested that they had

migrated there from the south in the twelfth century. As we have

seen, to counter the immigrationalist theory and overcome the gap

between the Romans’ retreat and the foundation of the principalities,

Kog

alniceanu argues that, in spite of disturbances caused by the bar-

barian peoples (particularly the Hungarians, who established themselves

in Pannonia in the ninth century), the Romanians withdrew to the

mountains and organized themselves into two embryonic republics. He

insists that these territories were independent and not, as Hungarian

historians asserted, subjugated and paying tribute to Hungarians or

Bulgarians.⁹³ Another solution involved exaggerating the Romanians’

better-documented presences south of the Danube, a theory that Tran-

sylvanian scholars had already advanced, culminating in speculation

that medieval Bulgarian tsardoms were actually Bulgarian-Romanian

‘composite’ states, in which the Romanian element occasionally domi-

nated. Kog

alniceanu subscribes to both tenets of this hypothesis. Firstly,

he professed that after the Roman withdrawal, during the course of

⁹² Kog

alniceanu, Opere, II. 394. ⁹³ Ibid., II. 164.

250 The Golden Age

struggles with Barbarian tribes, some Daco-Romans settled in the south.

Secondly, in the medieval Bulgarian rulers Peter and Ivan Asen he

detected these peoples’ descendants.⁹⁴

Kog

alniceanu claims that Romanian history included many fasci-

nating curiosities, surprising events, dreadful tragedies and hair-raising

horrors. His account of ‘the adventurous life and cruelties’ of the prince

Vlad T¸ epes, ‘the greatest monster of nature and horror of humanity’,

combines revulsion with a degree of pride.⁹⁵ He asserts that the per-

verted barbarity of the prince, nicknamed Dracula, outdid even the

deeds of Tiberius, Domitian, Nero and Ivan the Terrible. Habits of the

prince included dining in a courtyard where Turkish hostages were tied

to a stake, and inviting beggars for dinner and having them thrown

onto a ﬁre. Kog

alniceanu also relates another tradition, according to

which the prince would often order his servants to cut the feet of the

Turkish hostages, sprinkle them with salt, and exacerbate the torture

by sending sharp-tongued goats to lick the wounds. This latter episode

substantiated Kog

alniceanu’s conclusion that the prince must have been

mentally ill.⁹⁶

A counterweight to such horrors is provided by a celebration of the

deeds of Prince Michael the Brave, primarily for his achievements as a

Christian warrior in the ﬁghting against the Turks, an accomplishment

that rendered him comparable to Themistocles and Achilles.⁹⁷ In the

1840s, Kog

alniceanu’s accounts of the prince began to place more

emphasis on his short-lived uniﬁcation of the three territories that were

to form the core of modern Romania: ‘Uniquely among the princes,

he was the only ruler who succeeded in unifying the constituent parts

of ancient Dacia, uniquely among them, he could address himself as

Michael, the prince of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania by God’s

grace.’⁹⁸ This change in emphasis corresponds to a shift in Romanian

historiography between 1830 and 1860, whereby the perception of

Michael underwent a metamorphosis from warrior and Christian hero

to emblem of Romanian unity. Thus, Michael’s uniﬁcation could be

interpreted in two ways: in retrospect it seemed like a short-lived

resurrection of ancient Dacia; with foresight, it represents an antecedent

of the future Romanian nation-state.⁹⁹ In that context, it provided

a pillar of continuity between the ancient and contemporary eras, in

the same way as the legacy of the Commonwealth for Lelewel and

⁹⁴ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, II. 27–41. ⁹⁵ Ibid., II. 112. ⁹⁶ Ibid., II. 112–13.

⁹⁷ Ibid., II. 390. ⁹⁸ Ibid. ⁹⁹ Boia, History and Myth, 42.

The Golden Age 251

the heritage of the Hussite movement for Palack

y. The modern era,

corresponding to the reign of the Phanariots in the eighteenth century,

represented a downturn for the course of Romanian history. This was

largely due to the ruling dynasties’ corruption and immorality which

had a detrimental effect on public spirit. Kog

alniceanu believed that,

during this era, most countries, including China, contributed to general

development, whilst the despotism of the Phanariots made Romania an

exception.

In addition to continuity, the other underlying theme of Romanian

historiography was the need for national unity. Kog

alniceanu saw the

strength of regional loyalties as a serious obstacle and argued that

these had to be subordinated to common national goals. He believed

that the reluctance of the Spartans, Thebans and Athenians to unite

under the banner of Hellas contributed to the fall of ancient Greek

civilization.¹⁰⁰ In a similar vein, internal conﬂicts between medieval

Lombards, Venetians and Neapolitans allowed the Germans to take

advantage of political fragmentation. Kog

alniceanu warned that even

his ancestors suffered from lack of unity; they perceived themselves as

Transylvanians, Moldavians and Wallachians, which was the source of

their misfortunes.¹⁰¹

For Romanian scholars ancient Dacia became the expression of

primordial unity, as well as being a vantage point for the deﬁnition of

the national space. In 1834, unfolding the history of ancient Dacians,

Kog

alniceanu began his Histoire with the following sentence: ‘In the

ﬁrst century AD a strong and powerful barbaric state shook civilized

Rome. This state, which was independent, was to be located on the

territory where Transylvania, the Banat, Moldavia and Wallachia are

now situated: it extended from the Theiss (Tisza) and the Carpathians

to the Danube, Dniester and the Black Sea.’¹⁰² Using this demarcation

of the lands of ancient Dacia, Kog

alniceanu constructed a national

desideratum about the borders of a future Romanian state. At the time

when he was writing, the Romanian state did not exist, and the term

Dacia was applied to the entire national territory, as illustrated by

the title of Kog

alniceanu’s journal, Dacia Literar

a.¹⁰³ Kog

alniceanu’s

designation of the national space testiﬁes to contemporary fascination

with ‘natural borders’, as manifested in the image of a perfect, almost

¹⁰⁰ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, II. 394. ¹⁰¹ Ibid. ¹⁰² Ibid.

¹⁰³ The world Romania was ﬁrst coined by a Transylvanian Saxon scholar in the eighteenth

century; subsequently it was employed by a Greek historian in the early nineteenth century.

252 The Golden Age

circular space, delineated by three great rivers: the Danube, the Dniester

and the Theiss, and reinforced by the Carpathian mountains which pass

right across it.¹⁰⁴ As well as geographical factors, the desired union of

the two principalities was underlined by the condition that Wallachians

and Moldavians were brothers in the cross, in blood, in language and

in law; they shared the same hopes and anxieties.¹⁰⁵ Nevertheless, such

a union was not inevitable: as with Bohemia and Moravia in Palack

y’s

case, the history of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia was

informed as much by rivalry and conﬂict as by political alliance.

Furthermore, Kog

alniceanu’s historical and political endeavours were

coloured by loyalty to his home region and Moldavia retained a degree

of individuality in his work.

In 1859, the dream of Romanian politicians was fulﬁlled: the two prin-

cipalities were united and Romania became a nation-state. Nevertheless,

this was not yet the resurrection of ‘ancient Dacia’, as Transylva-

nia remained a missing element in the desired geographical design.

Transylvania had to be included because Kog

alniceanu regarded all

Romanian-speaking territories as his fatherland, and he actively pro-

moted cultural ties between the principalities and Transylvania.¹⁰⁶ In

his journal, the Dacia Literar

a, he often republished articles that had

appeared in Transylvanian periodicals. His loyalty, however, did not

manifest itself in concrete territorial claims. Since the dismemberment

of the Habsburg Monarchy seemed illusory during this era, there could

be no union between Transylvania and Romania. A federation seemed

more feasible, and hence politicians sought the autonomy of Transylva-

nia, or an autonomy that included all provinces of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire with a Romanian population.

In 1878 the southern part of the former Ottoman province of Dobro-

gea was annexed to Romania, in return for Southern Bessarabia’s seizure

by the Russian Empire. The new arrangement disturbed traditional vi-

sions about national territory, as the region had never been considered to

belong to it, and its attachment to Romania was initially an unwelcome

development. As the British statesman William Gladstone noted, this

province was as ‘a gift ungraciously given and reluctantly received’.¹⁰⁷

Dobrogea’s diverse ethnic composition was perceived as a danger to

¹⁰⁴ Boia, History and Myth, 132.

¹⁰⁵ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, II. 394. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Constantin Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation- and State-Building: The Integration of North-

ern Dobrogea into Romania 1878–1913 (Pittsburgh, 2002), 8.

The Golden Age 253

the country’s homogeneity and political stability. Nonetheless, after the

initial shock, Romanian scholars began to focus their efforts on inte-

grating the region into Romania, both geographically and historically,

a motivation that informed Kog

alniceanu’s declaration that ‘Dobrogea

isnotaBulgarianland;ineverycorner...weﬁndtracesofourRo-

manian ancestors.’¹⁰⁸ Kog

alniceanu supported this by augmenting the

insubstantial evidence, noting Wallachia’s temporary possession of the

region at the beginning of the ﬁfteenth century and the many ethnic

Romanians in the province. He also called for archaeological excavations

in order to ﬁnd traces of the Romanian presence there. Later, the theory

that Dobrogea had been an ancient Romanian land which returned to

the ‘mother country’ took root in Romanian historiography, becoming

an integral part of the national ideology.¹⁰⁹

CONCLUSION

Whilst my protagonists attributed analogous qualities to the Golden

Age, they simultaneously discerned aspects of that era in many diverse

epochs and by appealing to different ideological traditions and political

languages. Daukantas’s account was indebted to the humanist heritage

to a greater extent than that of his four colleagues. His veneration of

paganism, and frequent parallels between ancient Greeks and Romans

and ancient Lithuanians, resembled the stance adopted by some con-

temporary Irish historians, who asserted that the ancient kingdom of the

Gaels had once been on an equal footing with the societies of ancient

Greece and Rome and that paganism, an uncorrupted natural religion,

was commensurate with the cults of the great ancient civilizations.¹¹⁰

Daukantas understated the continuity between the early modern

Polish and Lithuanian states and forged a link between the era of

the medieval Grand Duchy and contemporary Lithuanians, anticipat-

ing Lithuanian independence. Horv

ath believed that the Compromise

provided Hungary with the arrangement best suited for the political

circumstances of the age, whilst Palack

y envisaged his nation’s future

¹⁰⁸ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, Vol. IV, pt. 4, p. 639, quoted in Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation-

and State-Building, 14.

¹⁰⁹ Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation- and State-Building, 14.

¹¹⁰ Colin Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Scotland and

Ireland’, English Historical Review 109:434 (1994), 1202.

254 The Golden Age

as part of a multi-national federation. Such dilemmas were character-

istic of subordinate entities in composite states. Anti-unionists prized

national independence most highly; their counterparts believed that a

more advanced state offered beneﬁts which outweighed the advantages

of (relative) autonomy. This preoccupation was by no means conﬁned

to East-Central Europe; among other examples, it constituted the major

concern for Scottish historians after the Act of Union in 1707, as well

as for Norwegian scholars in the nineteenth century. In both cases,

advocates saw close coexistence with England and Denmark respectively

as an opportunity for modernization and the advancement of civiliza-

tion; those who opposed it emphasized the colonizing nature of the

subordination.

In addition to sensitivity to national affairs, social concerns also

found an echo in my historians’ representations of the Golden Age,

as illustrated by their admiration of rulers who acknowledged the

status of unprivileged people. To that end, Lelewel’s veneration of

the Commonwealth’s political institutions resonated with the native

republican tradition, and his attitude towards social reform evoked

radical Enlightenment ideals as well as those of contemporary democrats.

Horv

ath’s emphasis on the originality of Hungarian political institutions

resembled the early modern feudal tradition of the ‘ancient constitution’,

but dovetailed with a modernizing, ‘Whiggish’ discourse. Rather than

defending the nobility’s ancient privileges, it advocated the emancipation

of oppressed people. Moreover, uniquely among my historians, Horv

ath

argued in favour of industry and trade because they were perceived

to facilitate liberty, thereby endorsing the fundamental tenet of the

commercial tradition.

Only Palack

y’s narrative, infused with Protestant sympathies, was

markedly shaped by an explicit confessional orientation. His praise

of the Hussite movement and veneration of Jan Hus reﬂected the

Romantic era’s fascination with heretics and religious reformers. Ranke’s

rendering of Martin Luther as a symbol of German unity and Jules

Michelet’s elevation of Joan of Arc into the most potent symbol of

French nationhood provided other examples of this trend. Heretics

distinguished themselves by their fearless opposition to the ruling

order (whether ecclesiastical or secular), evident in their willingness to

sacriﬁce their lives for their principles. Consequently, as the reaction

of the Austrian authorities to Palack

y’s portrayal of Hus indicates, they

could be appropriated to good effect by historians who opposed existing

regimes.

The Golden Age 255

Kog

alniceanu’s appraisal of a ‘traditional hero’, Prince Michael the

Brave, entailed redeﬁning his original role from that of a Christian

warrior into a proponent of Romanian unity. Perhaps the most obvious

parallel to Romanian historians’ preoccupation with unity and conti-

nuity is demonstrated by Greek historical writing. Whilst Romanian

scholars sought to integrate their countrymen scattered throughout Mol-

davia and Wallachia and Transylvania, their Greek colleagues, believing

that Greece should not be identiﬁed with the history of a small kingdom,

strove to incorporate the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore,

in both cases historians had to bridge a gap between ancient and modern

times: in Romania this comprised asserting the existence of medieval

embryonic republics, whereas in Greek historiography it encompassed

the elevation of the Byzantine period, an epoch previously dismissed

as a dark and barbarous age, into a crucial stage, the representation

of the missing medieval link. Nonetheless, reﬂections on the national

past were not exclusively inward-looking. On the contrary, as the next

chapter will reveal, national self-images could only be deﬁned through

confrontation with ‘others’, by assessing the nation’s relationship to

foreigners, both inside and outside the conﬁnes of the national territory.

Perceptions of Others and Attitudes

to European Civilization

IMAGES OF THE SELF AND OTHERS

National identity is by its nature contingent and relational and thus na-

tional communities are inclined to deﬁne other groups by the negation

of their own self-image.¹ Following an assessment of self-perceptions in

the previous chapter, as exempliﬁed in the ﬂourishing eras of national

history, this chapter adopts a different approach to the subject, in rela-

tion to ‘others’: neighbours, dominant powers and (potential) enemies.

This is accompanied by an exploration of my historians’ orientation

in the broader context of European culture and society and of their

nation’s perceived contribution to the cause of European civilization.

Their perspectives embraced a wide spectrum and often shifted accord-

ing to the changing political scene. Of these, I seek to focus on common

trends and typical instances.

The construction of identities almost invariably involves asym-

metric classiﬁcations. Reinhard Koselleck demonstrated that the ﬁrst

documented political concepts expressing this kind of relation were

Hellene/Barbarian, and, later, the Christian/pagan pairings.² He termed

these counterconcepts asymmetric because the qualities which commu-

nities ascribe to one another are not reciprocal. With some adjustment,

Koselleck’s scheme may be applicable to studies into national iden-

tities; as we have seen in the previous chapter, internal conﬂicts in

national history were habitually imbued with appeals to antipodes,

such as Protestants and Catholics, defenders and opponents of reforms,

¹ See for example Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 271.

² Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts’,

in Koselleck, Futures Past, 158.

Perceptions of Others and European Civilization 257

and foreign versus national ideas.³ Perhaps even more signiﬁcantly,

the nation’s relationship to external others was characterized by binary

oppositions. The crystallization of the national territory, a corollary of

administrative centralization since the Enlightenment era, resulted not

just in the erosion (or at least fading) of regional frontiers, but also in a

more precise demarcation of external borders vis-

a-vis foreign nations.⁴

The process of delineating previously amorphous and unsettled borders

brought conﬂicting interests and overlapping territorial claims to the

fore, and consequently neighbouring nations were inherently cast in the

role of the signiﬁcant ‘external other’.

Even the history of Britain, an island geographically separated from

the continent, overlapped with that of France and this encouraged

British scholars to contrast a Protestant, robust Britain with an effete,

Catholic France. They set honest manliness and simplicity against the

perceived effeminacy and deceit of France and disparaged the artiﬁce

of French manners.⁵ The late nineteenth-century historian Edward

Freeman even declared that France was ‘the undying curse of Europe’.⁶

French historians, in turn, viewed Britain as their country’s chief rival.

For Jules Michelet Britain epitomized l’anti-France, a feudal nation

where the appearance of liberty was obtained at the expense of injustice

and inequality. He proclaimed that ‘the war of all wars, the struggle of

all struggles, is that between Britain and France, the rest(s) are minor

skirmishes’.⁷ Michelet reinforced his stance by ‘pervasive metaphors’:

he portrayed the English as brutal transgressors and insatiable meat-

eaters, whilst the French were vegetarian and lived in harmony with

nature, subsisting peacefully on milk and cereals. Nevertheless, such

stereotypes were not rigid and, with the onset of the Franco-Prussian

war, Germany gradually replaced Britain as the most dangerous rival

in Michelet’s view. In a volte-face, he expressed hopes for a future

reconciliation between the English and the French, underlined by

an alimentary analogy: he noted that the English were introducing

³ It has to be noted that Koselleck’s scheme only includes pairs of concept which claim to

cover the whole of humanity.

⁴ R. J. W. Evans, ‘Frontiers and National Identities in Central European History’, in

Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs. Essays on Central Europe c.1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006),

120.

⁵ Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 209.

⁶ The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, ed. W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols. (London,

1895), II. 10.

⁷ Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris, 1974), 224, quoted in Hans Kohn, ‘France between

Britain and Germany’, JournaloftheHistoryofIdeas17:3 (1956), 289.