After Empire: Michel Anagnosti’s Conservative and Confederative Critique of the Romanian Nation-State

• In Event: Religious, Class, and National Solidarity and Conflict in the Eastern European-Ottoman Borderlands, 1848-1939

Abstract

The period between the 1821 Greek Uprising and the end of WWI witnessed multiple shocks that marked the transition from empire to nation state in Southeastern Europe. To avoid nationalistic theologies in the understanding of this process, my paper will examine the writings of Michel Anagnosti, a representative of the Romanian generation of 1848, who emerged as a consistent critic of the national liberal mainstream of Romanian politics during the 1860s and the 1870s. Anagnosti argued that an attempt to apply the liberal-democratic institutions to a largely peasant and illiterate society was the cause of permanent political crisis experienced by the post-1859 Romania, and demonstrated the necessity of strong central authority relying on the enlightened councils of the national elite. Anagnosti also questioned the viability of small nation-state in the world dominated by great powers. He argued that the wellbeing of the peoples of Southeastern Europe could be better secured through reorganization of the European Turkey into a confederation of Romanians, Greeks, and Southern Slavs, as well as a restructuring of the Austrian Empire on a federative basis. Anagnosti’s ideas of the Balkan and Danubian confederations, just as his social critique of liberal nation-state constitute the entry points into an intellectual counterhistory of the Eastern Question and of the nineteenth-century liberalism that can serve the basis for a critical rethinking of the later European conflicts.

Author

• Victor Taki, Concordia U (Canada)