Transylvanian Regional Identity after 1989: Political Reflection

KOCIÁN, Jiří. Transylvanian regional identity and its political reflection after 1989. The thesis deals with the question of reviving Transylvanian regional identity and its political use in Romania after 1989. It demonstrates that regional identity has gradually grown in political importance, and represents the content, actors and typology of models of its reflection. The Romanian Communist regime under Nicolae Ceaușescu followed longer-term centralizing tendencies that did not favor maintaining regional specificities. But regional identity, like other collective identities, is the result of a continuous process of daily interactions between its bearers and external actors, all of whom are involved in its construction. Because of that, it survived a period of suppression in its vernacular form. Contributing to its survival was the fact that the multi-ethnic region of Transylvania and its specificities, which represent the core of regional identity, have a thousand-year history. The thesis points, by applying a discourse analysis of the content of newspaper articles, to the fact that regional identity took the form of political discourse after 1989. This discourse rivaled the previous discursive hegemony of the country's centralist concept of state and nation in Romanian public sphere. At the same..