Between Timisoara and Tirgu Mures
By Krzysztof Czyzewski
pogranic@free.ngo.pl
In the time of the memorable autumn of nations in 1989 in a certain city in
Banat that is called Timisoara by some people, and Temesvar by others, Romanians
and Hungarians arm in arm stood up in protest against the regime of Ceausescu,
which was the starting point of the upheaval in Romania. Nobody even mentioned
ethnic minorities at that time. They talked about a democratic opposition, about
the townspeople, about the citizens of Romania. A few months later, in March
1990, in a certain city of neighbouring Transylvania that is called Tirgu Mures
by some people and Marosvasarhely by others, Romanians and Hungarians full of
hatred stood up against each other. They fought. There were casualties.
Afterwards in Romania everything was back to "normal" - the ethnic
minorities started to close ranks as they had learnt for the whole present
century; they started to organise national political parties, continued to fight
for national universities, quarrelled about national "windows" in the
mass-media, awaited help from the capital, from their motherland, from the
League of Nations - oh, sorry - from the European Council of course.
Those two incidents of the modern history of Romania are symbolic of the
course of events in the whole Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. That
"normal" state of affairs that came into being after Tirgu Mures has
become common to all post-communist countries. It was sometimes established with
the help of an armed conflict, as it was in former Yugoslavia; sometimes through
bloody but incidental and on a small scale local conflicts, as it was in
Transylvania; and sometimes through minor but constant incidents in Silesia,
Spisz, Bukovina, in Vilnius, Przemysl, Komarno. Decisive for its dominance was
that the "normal" state was certain and natural, there was no other
state that could replace it. National communities, especially ethnic minorities,
entrenched their posts and started to defend their particular interests. The
number of existing front lines has been increased. But still, Timisoara is a
symbol of the chance we had for a short period of time in those turbulent times,
the chance to employ another scenario that would be based on the civic attitude
free of the pettiness of national egoism, ready for building on the basis on the
potential of our closest neighbourhood and multicultural traditions. In the
places we lived at there was a chance of finding - let us use a phrase by Jozef
Mackiewicz - the "successor to the whole", somebody to unite and
integrate the world, from which in the past time "everybody wanted to
snatch a piece for themselves". The very fact that Romanians and Hungarians
together stood up to fight for a common cause - there were with them also local
Germans, Serbs and Jews - could have resulted in a common political party, a
common university and an integrating educational school programme, common
television, radio or a paper. The divisions need not run along national or
religious borders. This seemed possible at that moment. In December 1989 in
Romania no one could speak ill of Hungarians, who were allies in a common fight.
A similar relationship held between Poles and Lithuanians, especially when the
first casualties were inflicted during an attack by the Soviet army on the
television tower in Vilnius N those heated speeches in Polish Sejm, the
atmosphere of solidarity with the neighbours fighting for independence, the
involvement in the fight for a common cause of groups of Lithuanian Poles. That
was similar to the events from the beginning of the second world war when, being
at variance with Poland, Lithuania opened its borders for Polish soldiers
running away from Soviets and welcomed them humanely.
It is possible to present more examples like that. All of them were
ephemeral. In Romania the ruling nomenklatura, who "stole" the
revolution in Timisoara in order to carry out an internal coup d'etat (the
thesis that the events in that December were purposefully provoked to gain that,
is now winning more and more supporters), was in fact afraid of one thing: a
Romanian-Hungarian alliance. They started to disseminate information that the
opposition betrayed the Romanian national interests to Budapest. The ancient
complexes and fears were breeding grounds for the slogan. In Timisoara Romanians
started to make believe they had nothing to do with Hungarians and asked their
Hungarian friends not to sign their mutual programmes but to write separate
ones. Tirgu Mures was nearing inevitably. The then propaganda was that
Hungarians wanted to separate Transylvania from Romania. Coaches started to come
to the city with Romanian peasants who remembered Hungarians from the 50s when
they had carried out collectivisation of their farms as communist clerks. That
easily goes together with a fresco to be found in a huge Orthodox church in the
main square of the city, where a Hungarian master canes a Romanian peasant. In
the very square after several days of isolated incidents two demonstrations -
Hungarian and Romanian - came together. The documentaries, which later echoed
worldwide, presented a man passionately beating another man with a cardboard
poster. They thought it was a Romanian beating a Hungarian, later it turned out,
however, that was the same as in the fresco.
Afterwards everything was back to "normal". 'Does it surprise you
we are now fighting for our Hungarian university?' - incredulously asked me my
acquaintance from Cluj (he used the name Kolozsvar), when I tried to convince
him that the notions "university" and "national" are
contradictory. We stood in the main square of the city in front of the monument
of a Transylvanian king of Hungary Mathias, on whose pedestal a national city
mayor George Funar had ordered to attach a plate in Romanian reading that the
king had been of Romanian origin and defeated by his own nation. Around the
monument archaeological excavations initiated by Funar were just about to be
started with the objective of finding ruins of ancient Roman buildings. In case
the works proceeded well, there would surely be necessary to remove (at least
for some time) the monument of the "defeated" king. The citizens, both
Hungarians and Romanians, who perceive Mathias as their common ruler, started
preparations for a protest. I learnt later that the government had stopped the
excavations under pressure from the protesters. On the other hand, they agreed
to have made a mistake when they had painted and plastered a plate commemorating
Jozef Bem during works to "tidy up" the city - the local authorities
had been misled by the fact that the name of the general had been pronounced in
Hungarian fashion - Jozsef. It was the citizens protests that revealed that Bem
was not a Hungarian but a Pole. That all happened in 1994. I would be able to
endlessly present similar examples from the same period of our Centraleuropean
"normality", which came into being after Tirgu Mures. In the
aforementioned Polish-Lithuanian borderland, where gossip had it that Warsaw
exhibited revisionist claims toward Vilnius, Lithuanian Poles quickly came to
the conclusion that it was a must to establish a Polish university in Vilnius,
and in Sejny people started to quarrel about the monument of Antanas Baranauskas,
who was a bishop of both Poles and Lithuanians.
Let us, however, leave at peace Tirgu Mures and its consequences, we are
already used to and rather willing to ignore them. What is in fact the
importance of those incidents of national or religious character in comparison
with the process of European integration? The problem, however, is that although
the incidents themselves are not dangerous and are only significant locally,
they reveal the existence of the old "normal" state of affairs, from
which both our own way of thinking and our behaviour originate, and which does
not undergo any changes and resists any reforms. But to look into the phenomenon
we would rather not ask about Tirgu Mures, but about Timisoara, about why
Timisoara was impossible in the long run?
The odds are that the communist ideology, which has broken down, will be
replaced by the nationalistic ideology, born though it was in the same century
but it seems to be more lively. Somebody said that in order to convert form the
communist into the democratic system one should change both the vocabulary and
the grammar, on the other hand, converting into the nationalistic system one
should change the vocabulary alone. Alarmingly, this change is actually being
effected easily and quickly. The inheritance of the former system adds to that;
the system fought with the national identity from the ideological point of view,
but it has practically strengthened the dominance of nationallpolitical
thinking. This does not only concern the former communist states. As early as at
the beginning of the 80s Isaiah Berlin drew our attention to the unexpected
renaissance of nationalism in the modern world. None of the distinguished
thinkers of the beginning of our century predicted that. They rather expected
the ideology to fade soon as it was based on a weak individual seeking for
support and appreciation from a given community. It was for those individuals
that national states were created, where the possessors of the rightful
nationality, and very often of the rightful faith, could feel at home and be
their own masters, they could speak "us" about themselves while
"them" about the others who were destined to get organised and to
fight to survive in so-called "minorities". The existence of such a
phenomenon as a national state had farlreaching consequences for the
organisation of social and political life, the way of thinking and evaluating.
It was the "grammar" that we have been using up until now. Michael
Billig has persuasively proved that in his book "Banal Nationalism".
Billig demonstrates how nationalistic thinking keeps on cropping up in the
language of the British and American politics as well as in the language of the
everyday press, when it does not even touch on grand national subjects. The
world we live in day-to-day seems to be categorised to a great extent according
to the national "us" and "them", although we sometimes do
not realise that. National identity is not one of many identities an individual
can freely choose from, it rather constitutes an individual's absolutely most
important identity and a "natural" one as it were, for it is being
imposed on him by the "form of life" that is a national state.
Timisoara was that Romanian-Hungarian "us" put against that
"them" representing a different universe of values. Thus, it was a
different "grammar". It may seem it is so little, but still in order
for a new "Copernican revolution" to be able to take place, one needs
to start from something. I called Timisoara a great chance that arose in the
autumn of nations in 1989. It would be naive to think we could then take it. On
the other hand, we may as well not have lost it completely. It seems that this
time history has mercifully allowed us a mite of time. It is worthwhile to use
it and try to answer the questions: why was Timisoara impossible at that time
and what conclusions should we draw from it?
We surely were not prepared to put forward a brand-new, clarified attitude
towards our Central-European reality. It was difficult for such an attitude to
take shape because of the fact that we were busy trying to free ourselves from
the communist system, which suppressed and artificially reduced national
feelings, which demanded that they be given vent and appreciation. On the other
hand, we took it for granted that in Europe there were readylmade model
attitudes being able to tackle various problems, including nationalistic ones,
so it would suffice to adopt them. In consequence in that critical moment only a
few of us felt the need to articulate a new position, to work out new models of
thinking and evaluating. On the one hand, we were busy eliminating communism, on
the other hand, we welcomed Europe and thus we preserved the nationalistic state
model and made room for its ideology - nationalism. Frankly, the European
rhetoric is nowadays very anti-nationalistic and at every step they underline
their fears connected with regenerating nationalisms of Central and Eastern
Europe, but the Western Europeans themselves take good care of their own
nationalism, which Michael Billig has uncovered in his book, and they are not
eager to change their "grammar". This could be easily proved with an
example of the attitude of the European states to the conflict in former
Yugoslavia, particularly in BosnialHerzegovina, but that is another story.
Anyway, we have welcomed this Europe but in many cases we forgot what we have
achieved ourselves, for example the line of Paris 'Kultura' promoting consistent
acceptance and growing co-operation with close neighbours, which would not be
possible without prior getting rid of various nationalistic resentments and
prejudices; or we forgot the idea of Central Europe promoted by dissident and
emigrant circles. Paradoxically, in 1989, when we could set about putting them
into practice, we lost interest in them, all of a sudden it appeared that they
were unrealistic, or secondary. On top of it, our intellectuals l with
their usual self-criticism - acknowledged their own uselessness, and realised
that on the bankruptcy of all the ideologies there was no point in proposing any
new ideas.
That is how one could present the situation after it turned out that
Timisoara is an ephemeral spontaneous effort and impossible in the long
run. Was it possible to fight back approaching Tirgu Mures, which was based on
ancient convictions, complexes, weaknesses, profits, structures? Their power
stems from their triviality, in other words, they are almost invisible and
perceived by people as something natural. This "grammar" cannot be
changed overnight. As I mentioned before, this is my conviction that it is still
plausible to make not Tîrgu Mures but Timisoara become the symbol of
the Central European identity. A lot has changed since then, and still is. Those
changes are evidenced by the example of my friends Smaranda Enache and Elek
Szokoly, who are the leaders of "Pro Europe League" with its seat in
Tirgu Mures. As many other intellectuals they started with openness towards
Europe and irrepressible urge to bring Europe to their city and region. And
thus, various Western experts started to come and seminars, conferences and
training sessions were held. After some time, however, they realised all the
activities had little significance to the life around them. At the same time,
this Europe did often disappoint them in comparison with their idea of Europe
they cherished from their Transylvanian perspective. The situation was extremely
tiring for them, who are people with straightforward attitude towards life and
who can see through either cheap glory or international recognition. Last time I
visited them in March last year. I arrived in the time of a cultural festival,
accompanied by various educational projects, that is organised by them each year
to commemorate the anniversary of Romanian-Hungarian unrest. The townspeople in
great numbers participated in meetings, especially young Romanians, Hungarians,
and Gypsies because Germans and Jews are rather elderly. They took part in
integrationist artistic workshops, all together learnt about the multicultural
heritage of their city, discussed openly historical problems and common future,
the teachers of Gypsy children discussed the problem of perfecting their
educational programmeÉ Then, all of them met at an evening performance by a
Romanian theatre or at a concert by a chamber orchestra from Budapest. I had an
idea that my friends' organisation's name could as well be "League Pro
Transylvania", or even better "Transylvania Pro Europe".
