Virtus Romana Rediviva: Latinitatea naționalismului ardelean între identitate națională, strategie politică și loialitate dinastică

• Published in: Transilvania (Sibiu)
• Main Author: Cosma, Valer Simion
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Romanian, Moldovan
• Published: 2022
• ISSN: 0255-0539
• DOI: 10.51391/trva.2022.10.04

his article discusses the ways in which the elites of Transylvanian Romanians living in the Habsburg Empire deployed claims to Roman heritage as both a key ingredient of nation building processes as well as a political instrument to secure political rights in a state in which Roman heritage enjoyed high symbolic value. Specifically, the article shows that several generations of intellectuals initially institutionalized in the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) Church, a politically well-situated institution, emphasized Romanians’ Roman (rather than Dacian) heritage to define the boundaries of the nation. Furthermore, they used the same ethnogenesis story to highlight Romanians’ prestigious status in the geocultural hierarchies of the empire following centuries of marginalization formulated in “civilizational” terms. At the same time, the choice for the Roman heritage also made sense from the perspective of political mobilization strategies to claim political rights denied to Romanians by the imperial status quo while expressing loyalty to the same imperial state itself until the moment it collapsed in the fall of 2018. In short, claims to Roman heritage were instrumentalized to serve nation building, political emancipation, and dynastic loyalty.