Antonescu's Regime Revisionism - the Transylvanian Syndrome

Résumé 0

The main thesis of this paper is that eastern ideological, military, territory recovering – and even gaining – and genocidal war was not more important, for the Antonescu regime and as the eastern front progressively withdrew, as social, political and diplomatic activities in order to modify the Balkan boundaries and above all to recover northern Transylvania, tacitly considered by most factors as more important for both, national identity and integrity. As a matter of fact, largely russified Bessarabia was a more backward and lesser Romanian elites producing before the annexation by Romania in 1917-1918 as a secondary consequence of defeat on the western front, whereas Transylvanian Romanians had created, in spite of official hungarization, some intellectual and economic elites linked to the more or less weak hope of democratization of the eastern half of the two-headed Empire under Viennese pressure. But if the gellnerian process of nation-building by emerging autochthonous elites was more advanced in Transylvania, the geopolitical situation of contact between powers of the Danubian Principalities permitted them to create earlier a national state after the Crimean War.