Noua retorică a naționalismului economic: suveranismul
The New Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism: Sovereignism

Summary/Abstract: The most recent parliamentary and presidential elections in Romania, at the end of 2024, recorded a spectacular and worrying rise of nationalist parties, their populist and isolationist rhetoric attracting the most significant number of voters after the events of December 1989, thirty-five years after the collapse of communism. Romanian nationalism has a long tradition, constituting an important element of political discourse in modern Romania, starting in the mid-19th century, with a peak period between the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Although tempered, it continued to exist both during the communist period (1947-1989) and in the first decades of the post-December era, in the latter case, with a somewhat marginal influence. The fundamental purpose of this article is to demonstrate that in the almost two centuries since the creation of modern Romania, nationalism has changed its rhetoric, but not its main ideas and essential objective. Although it uses a different language, a somewhat different linguistic arsenal, the economic nationalism of recent years aims to slow down the process of integrating Romanian society into the Western world, in other words, to slow down Romania's modernization, its synchronization with Western civilization, trying to keep it in the Byzantine world. The keyword that summarizes the new rhetoric of economic nationalism – sovereignism – is one imported from the nationalist movement in Europe, which has been on the rise in recent years in many European Union countries, but, in essence, it does not bring a significant change to the logic of the old nationalism, presented today in a new packaging, but with a similar ideological content.

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