National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania Book

The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. This book shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule. I found particularly enlightening Verdery's discussion of Romanian protochronism, or the tendency to define virtually everything as a 'Romanian first.' Having traveled extensively throughout the new Eastern Europe and having conversed with many academics, students, and laymen from these countries, I always found it fascinating how obsessed these people are with claiming primacy for their intellectuals, their artists, their history (especially their origins, often fabricated at worse and exaggerated at best0, indeed, all of their 'accomplishments. Verdery asserts, at least in Romania, this tendency flows not only from a historically and geographically frail position between competing imperialist empires (Austrian, Russian, Ottoman, mostly), but also from the tendency of cultural elites to use national pride and national 'essence' as nation-state unifiers. Even though the collapse of communism, or in Romania's case, sociology, occurred more than twenty years ago, it seems to me that the protochronist tendencies still abound in states such as Romania.