Romania at the Intersection of Different Europes: Implications of a Pluri-Civilizational Encounter

In the chapter, it will be argued that in the case of Romania, it is rather difficult to make sense of its historical trajectory if it is relegated to a singular and homogenized civilizational background. Being firmly situated within the Eastern part of Europe, it is deemed Balkan, South-Eastern, or simply Eastern European, and therefore its national culture is deemed the outcome of a singular Eastern – Byzantine, Ottoman, and Orthodox – civilizational experience. As the Romanian historian Andrei Pippidi points out, one popular way of representing the Balkans as a historical and cultural unit (and Romania as a part of it) is by seeing it as the result of successive Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule (Pippidi 1999: 97). Tom Gallagher, a well-known expert of Romanian politics, equates this cumulative legacy with the ‘dead weight’ of the Romanian pre-modern ‘legacy of backwardness’, which the 19th century liberals needed to face in their modernizational efforts (Gallagher 2005: 18-19). Instead, Tony Judt defines the Romanian position by what it is not: 2 Romania cannot be understood as part of Central Europe in that it cannot be regarded “European”, at least not in the sense that one could perceive of Hungary or Slovenia as “fully European” (Judt 2001). And Samuel Huntington differentiates the Romanian historical trajectory by relegating Transylvania to Western Christian civilization while sub-Carpathian Romania is considered part of the Orthodox Christian sphere (Huntington 1993: 30). The (implicit) designation of (part of) Romania to a singular Byzantine/Orthodox/Ottoman background tends to conflate the three civilizational legacies, to neglect what is distinct about them, and to ignore how Romania has related to these legacies in specific ways over time.