The politics of writing history: Historians' debates and high-school history teaching in post-socialist Romania

Sergiu Delcea

doi:10.22151/politikon.22.5

Authors

Sergiu Delcea Central European University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.22.5

Keywords:

nationalism, ethnicity, case study, Romania, minority

Abstract

After exhibiting one of the "hottest" instances of ethno-national related violence in all post-socialist transitions, early 90s Romanian society seemed to have "cooled" down in terms identitarian conflicts, hence making it even more surprising why an apparently small-scale debate concerning history textbooks quickly spiraled to the point of becoming a fully-fledged public scandal against a Government dubbed as "Anti-Romanian". The aim of this paper is thus to contribute to the overarching research question: Why did nationalism remain such a powerful force despite the fall of the Ceausescu regime? To provide a comprehensive answer the article looks at two, tightly interwoven, sides of cultural reproduction: the politics of history-teaching in Romanian high-schools and its more general background -historians' debates on nationalism. The conclusion reached through this analysis is that a conservation of ethno-centered nationalistic thinking about history was generated by a distorted understanding of professionalization of history qua science.

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Author Biography

Sergiu Delcea, Central European University

Sergiu Delcea is a second year MA student in the Nationalism Studies Programme, Central European University, Budapest, with a previous background in Political Science (graduated BA studies in 2012) from the University of Bucharest. He is currently a member of the editorial board for the IAPSS blog A Different View, where he is exploring his current research interests that revolve around linking nation-building processes and welfare-regime construction (with a focus on Eastern Europe).