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    STUDIA HISTORIA - Issue no. 1 / 2005  
         
  Article:   ROMANIAN NATION-FORMATION IN TRANSYLVANIA: THE STAGES, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1914.

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  Abstract:   The origins of nations and the emergence of nationalism and national movements have been the subject of scholarly, and sometimes unscholarly, attention since the nineteenth century. At the theoretical level the debate about the nature and role of nation became especially sharp in the second half of the twentieth century, as modernists boldly challenged traditional conceptions. New explanations for the appearance of nations and their character and new estimates of their longevity held that they were constructs founded upon economic and social realities specific to the modern age. Such arguments clashed with the certainties of the so-called primordialists and perennialists about the age-old existence, even the permanence of nations in human society. Still another body of scholars―the ethno-symbolists―proposed what might be called a third way of approaching the matter. They emphasized historical and cultural links to the past, but at the same time they accepted the essential modernity of nations. This paper proposes to measure the evolution of the Romanian nation in Transylvania against the background of wide-ranging theory. It aims especially to examine which paradigms of nation-formation―traditional or modernist―accommodate best the Romanian case, that is, how accurately one or another theory accounts for the emergence and development of the Romanian nation. It is divided into three main parts: first, an examination of the theories of representative modernists, primordialists, perennialists, and ethno-symbolists and of others who have influenced the debate about nationhood; second, the identification of the principal stages in Romanian nation-formation; and third, some suggestions as to the commonness and the uniqueness of the Romanian case.  
         
     
         
         
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