Crowding Out: Experiences of Difference, Discourses of Identity and Political Mobilization in Interwar Transylvania
Crowding Out: Experiences of Difference, Discourses of Identity and Political Mobilization in Interwar Transylvania

Summary/Abstract: Parties in opposition in interwar Romania frequently relied on extraparliamentary action, mainly mass mobilization campaigns to prove their popular support. The National Peasant Party employed a discourse of identity as means of politics of identity bound to negative everyday experiences of its leaders and supporters, delimiting itself from the Old Kingdom and its representatives the liberals. The characteristics of Transylvanians and Old Kingdom Romanians were essential in the concepts of inherently democratic, Transylvanians and oligarchic, despotic, Balkan elite Old Kingdom ones. As a result Transylvanians emerged as the authentic Romanians, whose destiny was to liberate Old Kingdom peasants from foreign rule. Besides, the party used the memory and experience of the revolution of 1918 to legitimize the use of extralegal means against the liberal governments and gradually redefined democracy in this sense. This set of factors generated a self-feeding cycle in which mass mobilization reinforced the necessity for a politics of identity that positioned the party – identical with the nation – in a binary opposition to the “others”, a process that drove NPP farther from parliamentarism, contributing to the fall of the supposedly parliamentarian system.

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