Identităţi etno-culturale şi mecanisme ale etnicității în contextul securitar interbelic: comunităţile de şvabi din România Mare / Ethno-cultural identities and mechanisms of ethnicity in the interwar security context: Swabian communities in Greater Romania.

Abstract

In the first decades of the 20th century Europe was marked by important systemic transformations which decisively affected various societal and political factors. The outbreak of World War I caused the collapse of entire European empires and prepared the path for the emergence of a new political order dominated by new established nation-states. The rise of Greater Romania occurred in this particular context, fulfilling therefore a much-needed national objective, namely the unification of all the historical provinces inhabited mostly by ethnic Romanians. Soon after the Great Union the young Romanian state became a major administrative challenge for the political stakeholders of that time. In this respect one of the major issues was the situation of minorities especially in the new incorporated regions such as Banat or Transylvania. The strategic need of Romania’s centralized administration to make minorities loyal in order not to potentially undermine the state interests was in many cases perceived as an aggressive attempt to homogenize the social sphere in multicultural regions. This paper attempts to investigate the social dynamic of Swabian minority groups in the first years after the Great Union and their attitudes towards political processes or geopolitical transformations. The main objective of this analytical undertaking is to highlight the ethnic dimension of civic culture and to uncover the social predispositions towards certain types of activism.

Keywords

• ethnicity
• social structure
• great union
• swabians
• banat