Les politiques de l’éternité

Abstract

This article proposes two possible ways of reading and interpreting the political thought that nourishes the concept of “greater Romania,” united under the encompassing concept of politics of eternity. It is, first of all, a rejection of the Western model as it was implemented by the previous generation or at least of its ideology: progress, diversity, Western fashions in general are only symptoms of a modern shattered pathology that needs to be cured by recovering the original spring of Romanian identity, that being generally an imagined Romanian Peasant and its semi-manufactured traditions. It is in this sense that the present text offers a reading on the naturalization of modernity (synonymous until then with the West) and its adaptation to the eternal rhythms of an ideal Romania. Second, “eternity” is fixed through an ideological junction, which often ignores traditional left-right doctrinarian divides. Not sufficiently structuring for the system of political parties preparing for the 1918 moment, this split was replaced by a unifying discourse on the permanence of the Romanian soul in its various incarnations, among which the predominant one is the territorial unification as the only appropriate vessel. Language, discourses, public policies, governance are strategically oriented towards a unifying objective. The process of Westernization becomes both a source of modernity—in the constitutional and democratic understanding of the process—and of anti-modernity—in the refusal of the accelerated time which is specific to modernity but which entails an annoyance s leaning on its opposite: the immobility of eternity, which we will look for in a tradition often recomposed from scratch.

Keywords

• modernity
• political fictions
• nationalism
• Romanian political thought
• South-East Europe