About ~ Scientific and Cultural Importance
Historian and literary critic Virgil Nemoianu (1997) described the ‘ethos of instruction’ as crucial in Central European modern society as social recognition of individual ideals. Romania’s 19th century intelligentsia became an active agent in intercultural and political transfers, shaping its identity through history, language, culture in the European context (Charle 2001). Central and East European empires collapsed under the pressure of the Great War trauma and violent nationalism, in favor of national states. The end of World War I produced a schism between eras. Yet the new order could not abandon the past (Schmitt 2019). The interwar era was built around European cultural and educational centers, encouraging modernization of national education (Nastasă-Matei 2016, 46). But new power centers emerged, including the US as a political, economic, military and cultural sphere of influence, under temporary Central and East European decline. Cultural negotiation shifted its interest from European academic centers, towards the American cultural and political model (Huntington 1981). The project topic expands the literature on Romanian-US relations from diplomacy, politics and sociology (Răceanu 2005) towards education, culture, intellectual life, religion, gender, art. It aims to decode and correlate negotiations between cultures and disciplines. It offers a clear insight into how collective identity was recalibrated at the Age of Empires’ end, amid turbulent power center fluctuations. The world’s new political configuration brought a more solid and persistent redistribution of cultural and university centers, with the United States in full affirmation. This contribution is especially important in recovering the ignored or deliberately omitted facts regarding the interwar dialogues between Romania and the United States. As this relationship is ever more important in the 2020s, this project joins the post-1989 significant strides in restoring productive cultural and educational negotiations between the two partners. America’s growing attention towards Romania in the interwar era extended beyond history, politics and diplomacy, with financial, cultural and educational investments. The interwar Romanian-American relations thus imply inherent complexity and dynamism. This project offers innovative methodologies and themes analyzed through interdisciplinary, multi-perspective and inter-cultural approaches stemming from notions like negotiation, dialogue or educational and cultural communications. The timeframe covers two crucial decades in Romania’s history, from 1920 with Romania’s recognition as a national state, until 1940 as Romania aligned itself with the Axis as a National Legionary State. 1930 is both a midpoint and a landmark of Romania’s veering towards increasingly extremist political, cultural and social movements. This project follows the complex negotiations between Romania and the United States as direct consequences of political and diplomatic debates and decisions in the interwar era and the first years of World War II. The research adds to the current literature on American Romanian relations and archival documents before 1920 (Rus 2018) with a comparative methodology, beyond the traditional description of the American-Romanian relations primarily in terms of America’s unilateral political and economic interests in Central and East Europe. It thus highlights flexibility, mobility and interchangeability, replacing the rigid hierarchies established on binary terms like center and periphery. This project examines instances of both successful and unsuccessful Romanian-American formative cultural and educational negotiations, beyond interpretations of unilateral transfers from the center, as the United States and the marginal Other, as Romania. It transcends self-focused perspectives, culpabilization and self-victimization, favoring panoramic intercultural and transnational views. The approach is interdisciplinary, ranging from history (cultural, intellectual, social, political, economic, history of education, history of religion, art history) to cultural (religious, fashion, travel, memory, identity) studies, and imagology. The research applies cultural studies concepts (negotiation, difference, diversity, discourse, power relationship, representation) to historical investigation to further relativize the borders between disciplines, identities and cultures.