Bukovina Between 1880-1910: An Ethnic and Confessional Perspective
Bukovina Between 1880-1910: An Ethnic and Confessional Perspective

Summary/Abstract: Between 1880 and 1910, in multiethnic Bukovina each ethno-confessional community had a cultural life marked by a certain autonomy, possible thanks to the cultivation of the mother tongue and the existence of religious freedom. Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, including smaller communities of Hungarians or Armenians, preserved their own traditions. But, after a hundred years of Austrian administration, based on a strong centralization of political and economic decisions especially until 1860, combined with a functional autonomy in 1880, segregation was largely replaced by political competition and socio-political and cultural communication. Modernization spoke its mind and produced changes and consequences. Each larger ethnic group in Bukovina fought during this period to acquire a form of power and influence. The struggle to assert one’s own identity in the socio-political, economic and religious space, tempered by a certain tradition of tolerance and mutual respect. At the same time, Romanians, Ukrainians, Germans, Jews or Poles had to take into account the Bukovina ethno-confessional reality and, often, strove not to neglect the interests, sensitivities of others, always having in mind the construction of a particular, even privileged relationship with the central Viennese power. There was in this Bukovina a complex dynamic of the closure and opening of ethnicities and communities towards each other. Each community made an effort to preserve its national specificity, but sometimes it also became receptive to what was happening within the other communities. The Romanian community seemed more united than divided; the project was fighting for being the union with the Kingdom of Romania or, at least, the preservation of rights, of its own culture and of its mother tongue. Although there were, as always in history, people who pursued their personal projects and not the community project, the Romanians, through groups of aristocrats, intellectuals and clergy, and among the peasants, have primarily aimed at the national ideal. The Austrians created what in today’s historiography is called a (pseudo)historical narrative, through much propaganda, education and administrative strategies, which, however, over time, took on content and legitimacy in the real historical dynamics, effectively becoming a historical narrative. The central representations of this story are related to the Bukovina’s identity, marked by tolerance, acceptance and practice of multiethnicity and multiconfessionalism, patronized by a modern society, and based on an Enlightenment-type organization.

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