Ciubotă, Viorel - Nicolescu, Gheorge - Ţucă, Cornel (szerk.): Jurnal de operaţiuni al Comandamentului Trupelor din Transilvania (1918-1921) 2. (Satu Mare, 1998)
Istorie şi Geografie Istorică / Geschichte und Landeskunde / Történelem és országismeret - Regiuni de frontieră şi zone de contact / Grenzreionen und Kontakträume / Határvidékek és kapcsolódási területek
The Carpatho-Rusyn Particularity As A Model Of Borderland 287 Along with this process of Nation-building, helped and supported for the majority of the nations by the States themselves, we can assist now also to the flourishing, the birth of the rebirth of the so-called submerged nations, or nations without a State (DEVETAK-FLERE-SEEWANN 1993; FREEMAN, PANTIC, JANJIC 1995; GIRASOLI 1995; HORAK 1985), i.e. all this ethnic groups which never succeeded in getting, or simply never felt the need ofhaving an own State, since their history is the one of particular linguistic or ethnic groups loyally living within the borders of a State, as it can be the Sorbian case-study, or of different States, as the Carpatho- Rusyns, which shall be now the object of our attention. The terminology, for historians as well as for linguists, ethnographers, sociologues and so on is matter of the utmost importance: we should use, in our opinion, the term “regional identity” for the Sorbians and “borderland identity” for the Carpatho-Rusyns, since there is no need to use the term “Nation” for social groups which up to now had no need to organize themselves as an own State: once again, we can see that the term “Nation”, as already shown and demonstrated by many a researcher, has no more reason to exist or to be used. It is only the bad relict of the XIXth century’s utopia of “National States” (ALTER 1994; AUGUSTINOS 1996; CHABOT 1986; FRANZINETTI 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996; GELLNER 1983; GRITTI 1997; HOBSBAWM 1990; KELLAS 1991; MUREŞANU 1996; ROMSICS 1998; SMITH 1991; WOOLF 1996), which brought Europe to the two World Wars and, in this last decade of the century, to what happened in Bosnia or Kosovo, just to forget what is happening now in the Caucasus, or in Transnistrovia, problems absolutely forgotten by the mass-media since in those lands there are not the same interests the western investors could find in the dissolution of former Yugoslavia. Anyhow, to a State can belong many “Nations”, and in Europe we see no State nationally homogeneous: for this reason we should avoid to use the terms “National State’ or “State-Nation” or “Nation-State” if not only for historiographical purpose. The same can be told while dealing with the concept of “nationality”, a bad, although often used, english translation of the slavic words narodnost narodnist narodnost or narodowooece, whose meaning refers to the belonging to an ethno-cultural system, not to an ethnopolitical one. And we should not forget that, until the French revolution for the Western Europe and the Congress of Vienna for the Central Europe, the ethno-cultural identity was shaped only on ethno-sacral basis and not on ethno-linguistic ones (HEUBERGER-KOLAR-SUPPAN 1994; LATAWSKI 1995; SUGAR 1995). An Italian writer, Morandi, already observed that the principle of nationality is the one who wants to see the same borders for States and Nations and that this principle, as well as the right of there to selfdetermination, are based on the supposal that first of all exist the peoples, which, at a certain moment of their lives, decide to constitute themselves in Nations asking for an own State.
