Sorin Antohi

Panel 1 Greater Romania

Abstract

Greater Romania, largely an unintended consequence of WWI, could hardly be greater indeed. Only a French general had the vision of a larger new Romania, stretching all the way to the Adriatic and thus including some of those Balkan lands and populations Romanian scholars cannot really place on their (mental) maps.The bad news was, Greater Romania consisted, even more than the Old Kingdom, of an ethnic, linguistic, confessional, local/regional, and symbolic geographical mix that could not be straitjacketed into the brand new frame of a fledgling nation-state.

The paper explores the symbolic foundations of interwar Romanian nationalism, insisting on the momentous transition from metaphysics to biology in the normative definition of ‘Romanianness’. ‘Ethnic ontology’ is that cluster of philosophical doctrines, ideologies, cultural fashions, and civil religions that ascribe the ‘chosen (ethnic) Nation’ a time (not merely a history), a space (not merely a territory), a Being (not merely an ethnic/national character). When (the ethno-national) Being is understood in a biopolitical, indeed biological way, ethnic ontologies reach their lowest, most somber point. Frobenius and Heidegger (to give two German examples), Blaga and Mircea Vulcănescu (to give two Romanian examples) are no longer enough. Their culturalist and metaphysical visions are replaced by biologist and racist projects.

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