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Dr Zoltán Pálfy
Panel 3 The Hungarian Minorities
Abstract
This paper focuses on the interwar Romanian state’s efforts to remould the educational system to suit its politically engineered need for national integration. Considering the specificities of the Hungarian ethnic community in Transylvania, I argue that, on the one hand, some of the unexpected yet enduring legacies of nationalizing education were determined by the ethnic aspects of such unifying reforms. On the other hand, the long-term failure to modernize the educational system as such partially stemmed from the ethnic competition that characterised it as re-nationalizing the educational system in Transylvania also meant taking over the structural deficiencies inherent to it. Sheer quantitative expansion, expressed in ratios of enrolment achieved through the depletion of former non-Romanian educational assets, could not, as it was so optimistically assumed in the early days of the change of sovereignty, automatically entail a qualitative boom.
Greater Romania hence presents us with but one of several examples of the most common response to the perceived challenge induced by the presence of ethnic minorities, that is, majority nationalism. Beyond considerable regional differences, non-Romanian ethnic clusters that, like the Transylvanian Magyars, had previously held dominant positions became a key concern for the nationalizing state. Consequentially, the concept of nationhood was exacerbated and articulated as the paradigm along which integration ought to be pursued.
And so all quarters of public life, all levels of education both the means and ends to nationalizing efforts, experienced various degrees of ethnic cleavage. The main target of the Romanian ‘cultural offensive’ launched by Old Kingdom-based governments was to unify by removing regional characteristics and advancing the positions of ethnic Romanians in general. In Transylvania, ethnic, social, and economic dominance had been defined by the region’s specific history. This entanglement thus accounts for the state’s reforms’ effects on state administration, education, religious affairs, and the economic setup.
The formerly Hungarian-dominated educational system, and the state-owned job-market it fed, came under siege in interwar Transylvania. From the Romanian point of view, the Hungarian educational system’s subsequent depletion was duly justified by its ethnically disproportionate character before the war, especially at its upper levels. The series of measures geared towards the Romanianization of educational affairs were part and parcel of the general social revolution designed to be implemented along national lines. Redeeming the ‘autochthonous element’ is an acute and practical need at the outset, the project continuing even when its malfunctions become evident. The structural deficiencies inherent to an overtly nationalizing education then surfaced in the political radicalization of generations of graduates for whom sheer ethnic credentials would no longer secure the desired elevated social standing. Understood as rightful means of putting the ‘autochthonous element’ back into its deserved position, policies such as the ‘numerus clausus’ were readily adopted as safety-valves. In and beyond education, in the nation-building fervour, intra-ethnic social problems notoriously fell to the second place, or were altogether neglected in the face of a perceived ‘alien challenge’.
