Название: Between nation and empire : Russian and Romanian competing visions of Bessarabia in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century
Автор: Cusco, Andrei
Издательство: CEU
Год: 2008
Формат: pdf
Страниц: 531
Размер: 142.5 Мб
Язык: английский
This dissertation argues that, in the second half of the 19th century, the Russian province (later gubernia) of Bessarabia became an object of symbolic competition and contestation between the Russian Empire and the Romanian nation-state. Refusing to take both the national(ist) Romanian and the Russian/Soviet perspectives on the dynamics of the Bessarabian “problem” at face value, I argue that the symbolic contest over Bessarabia gradually crystallized in the post-Crimean War context. This competition was determined by Bessarabia’s position as a borderland and by the region’s marginality within the two conflicting projects of empire- and nation-building. Bessarabia provides an example of the entanglements, ambiguities and interconnections between discourses and practices of “nation” and “empire” that shape each other and also the fate of the populations inhabiting the physical and symbolic borderlands between polities that define themselves on the basis of opposing legitimizing principles. However, I also attempt to show that the population of the borderlands may, at certain moments, develop its own agency or react to central policies in ways unforeseen by their proponents. Most importantly, the legacies of empire (and nation) are present and constantly renegotiated in societies that have been constructed and imagined with the instruments provided by their previous history.