1918: One Nation and Two Memories
1918: One Nation and Two Memories

Summary/Abstract: Appealing to the case of Romania, captured at the inaugural moment of the Great Union in 1918, when the foundations for a modern national state were laid, the study focuses on the role of the memory in the establishment of the “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson) which are the nations. The hypothesis is that the national identity is the outcome of a multitude of distinctive characteristics and of their persistence in time. These are some of the features “recounted”, namely the founding narrations / myths that we ourselves tell to each other and/or the ones that others tell about us. Inoculated educationally and interiorized polemically, such collective myths are responsible for both the identity fluctuations and for the way in which, temporally, the political stands in a multi-ethnical state are being renegotiated.

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