Victor Neumann's Kin, People or Nation? is a translation of his Romanian-language book originally published in 2003, which at the time contributed to Romania's historiography on European ideas of nationhood. The book surveys some of the most influential nineteenth-century works of French and German political philosophy that contributed to the division of Europe along reified ethnocultural and national lines. Neumann suggests that European integration—both as an ideal and a legalistic and administrative practice in Europe—holds the possibility for overcoming contested social and political categories as well as longstanding cultural, linguistic, and political barriers in Romania.
The book consists of six main chapters, the first three examining European intellectual history and its attendant historiography on the theories of people, language, ethnicity, and nation. Neumann dissects how these terms are frequently conflated and misunderstood across European languages; showing how different national traditions formulated these ideas to create autonomous political and linguistic communities. He notes how shifts in language continually shape the development of political discourse, both within and between nations, and argues against conflating, for example, the French peuple with the German Volk, the Slavic narod, or the Romanian popor, lest the distinctiveness of these respective political cultures become diminished. Neumann also revisits familiar discussions on Jules Michelet's and Augustin Thierry's different concepts of peuple, Johann Gottfried Herder's Sturm und Drang, and Ernest Renan's Que'est-ce qu'une Nation. Elsewhere, the author analyzes their influence on twentieth-century political upheavals and divisions in east central Europe, notably the interwar and post-communist periods in Romania. He suggests that historical centers of multiculturalism and pluralism, such as were found in the cities of Prague and Timișoara during centuries past, can serve as models for harmonious coexistence and tolerance, especially with regard to minority populations, in a politically and economically integrated Europe: “At this new junction in political life, the civic spirit can drive national identity in a different direction and transcend ethnic divisions” (82).
The book's second half features two chapters on Romanian ethnocentrism and the Romanian conception (singular) of nation. Together, these chapters give a rendition of the last two centuries of Romania's often fraught intellectual path toward modern nationhood. For some readers, the binary refrain of Europe's “West” and “East” may be dated as a framework of analysis: “If Western Europe maintains social harmony through its stable political structures, Eastern Europe seeks to win over the masses by promoting ethnocultural values that promise to unify them. . . . . . While Western Europe possesses an appetite for confronting the realities of the past, Eastern Europe prefers to turn a blind eye to the darkest moments of its history” (88). While indeed differences exist in national political cultures and historicities across Europe, the author's referring to them in such categorical terms, at least at the time of this English-language translation some twenty years later, can undermine the more salient arguments about the opportunities for integration and pluralism. Turning a blind eye to the past, let alone achieving meaningful social progress, however inconsistent, is not a phenomenon on just one side of the continent. Nevertheless, the author ably challenges past ethnocultural understandings of Romanian nationality that informed master narratives about Romanian identity and belonging since the interwar period. According to Neumann, this “mélange of values and ideologies over time has distanced Romania from Western civilization” (110). To bridge this perceived distance, he argues that Romanian nationality should be understood in a more legalistic sense, one connected to citizenship, common territory, political administration, and “constitutional patriotism” (128).
Kin, People, or Nation? offers a good primer for readers interested in historical debates on Romanian national identity against the backdrop of European integration. This English version of the author's 2003 book might have benefited from a substantive revision engaging with the scholarship on nationalism studies over the last two decades, with perhaps an epilogue discussing the extent to which Romania has made progress on the many issues raised in the text. As it is, the book should probably be read in the context of its original publication, four years prior to Romania's accession to the European Union, and as a window into the scholarship of a widely read Romanian historian at the turn of the millennium.
