Playing to Win, Learning to Lose
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Playing to Win, Learning to Lose: Sport, Nation and State in Interwar Romania By Florin Faje Submitted to Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisors Professor Dan Rabinowitz Professor Don Kalb CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2014 CEU eTD Collection Statement I hereby state that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. The thesis contains no material previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Budapest, January 30th, 2014 CEU eTD Collection CEU eTD Collection Abstract The dissertation explores the role of sport in the making of the modern Romanian nation-state. It argues that sport has been instrumental for national unification, integration, and homogenization and for the consolidation of the Romanian state. In their turn, I show that these pressures operated to produce a distinctively Romanian sporting tradition premised on the Romanians perceived Latin “élan”. Romania’s extensive territorial expansion in the aftermath of the First World War inaugurated a historical conjuncture dominated by the need to affirm the new polity both domestically and internationally. At the same time, regional unevenness, ethnic diversity, conflicting views of modernization and development and a turbulent international environment heavily affected the structure, operation and results of the interwar Romanian state. The ascendance of modern sports and of programs of physical education during the early decades of the twentieth century made them into obvious and relatively ready available institutions to pursue these goals. Hence, I show that sports and physical education were soon taken up and encouraged by members of the Romanian elite in their effort to affirm Romanianness. This process was nowhere more visible and critical than in the region of Transylvania, where urban spaces were overwhelmingly non-Romanian and Hungarian, Jewish or German sporting clubs and associations were already in place since imperial times. Consequently, to explore the critical and often neglected role of sport in the making of the Romanian nation-state the current work is built around a case study of Universitatea Cluj, the par excellence Romanian club in Transylvania. Founded in 1919, the students’ sports association at the University of Cluj was a quintessential vehicle in establishing and safeguarding the nation locally, regionally and nationally. Universitatea’s history confounds with the history of Romanian administration in Transylvania. I devote major attention to the football section of the club, by far the most popular sport in Romania ever since the early interwar. The analysis of the club’s emergence, of its history and of the memories it triggered among its members afford crucial insights into the ways in which football worked to both support and undermine nation making and state consolidation. As an institution of sportsmen/intellectuals, a rarely observed sociological category, the analysis of its historical trajectory adds new facets to the making of modern sport. Moreover, Universitatea’s historically low levels of sporting achievement allow for a history of football rarely underwritten by performance and glory, as is often the case. This is a history of identification, loyalty and belonging that could do without sporting triumph in affirming and widely popularizing the national values that it stood for. In conjunction with the national developments that I explore, the case of “Universitatea” makes for a particularly interesting history of sport, nation and state, one where a rhetorics of cultivating bodies, minds and souls produced a sporting culture at odds with modern and contemporary developments in sport. To show that, wherever possible, I trace the history of the ideas that have animated Universitatea and the Romanian movements of sports and physical education beyond their formative years during the interwar into Romanian socialism and post-socialism. Overall, the dissertation refines CEU eTD Collection and adds substance to oft-repeated claims that sports are essential in the making of modern nation-states and endorses understandings of modern nationalism that stress its Janus-faced character. CEU eTD Collection Table of Contents Introduction 1 Sport, Nation and State 5 Nations and Nationalisms 11 State/society 19 National character and moral regulation 26 Chapter 1 – Playing for and against the Nation: Football in Interwar Romania 33 Unification through sport 38 The Transylvanian Arena 46 A National Team? 55 Chapter 2 – A Romanian Palaestra: Physical Education in Interwar and Postwar Romania 63 Unification in and through Physical Education 67 From foreign models to national morals 73 Palaestrica 84 The Socialist Palestrica 92 Conclusion 100 Chapter 3 – Trainers for the State and Nation: Physical Education and Elite Social Vision in Interwar Transylvania 102 The diagnosis 102 Intellectuals, Nationalism and Social Reform 108 Haţieganu’s intellectual contribution 113 Conclusion 129 Chapter 4 – A Sporting Arcadia: Memories of Nationalism and Poverty at ‘Universitatea’ Cluj 132 The Alma Mater 132 Baloney and mustard, third class trains and a hut 145 Conclusion 158 CEU eTD Collection Chapter 5 – Universitatea Cluj: “The Champion of Unbridled Élans” 163 The Birth 168 The Golden Ages 172 The Rivals 174 The Heroes 183 Chapter 6 – Managing “Furia Latina”: the Making of a Romanian Football System and Style of Play 193 Introduction 193 1935 – The Interwar Synthesis 200 1969 – The Socialist Synthesis 211 Discussion 226 Epilogue 231 Bibliography 244 CEU eTD Collection Introduction The present study explores the place of sport in the making of the modern Romanian nation-state. Its major temporal focus is on the interwar period. Wherever possible it traces the reconfiguration of sport, state and nation beyond the formative years into the postwar and post- socialism. Due to its unique place and crucial role in the making of modern Romania, developments in the region of Transylvania receive a special attention. Consequently, the study is built around the programs designed and implemented at the region’s most distinguished institution of higher education – the University of Cluj and its sports club “Universitatea”. This University was a central institution in the definition and cultivation of Romanianness since the creation of Greater Romania in 1918. Its programs of sport and physical education were endowed with a special role in the struggle to achieve national integration and state centralization soon after Romania’s territorial expansion in the aftermath of the First World War. As such, they open a vast space to explore the tensions, the contradictions, as well as the common points of reference that have set the limits and shaped the trajectory of Transylvania’s incorporation into Romania. The history and memory of “Universitatea” students’ sports club impressively shows the ways in which sports were used to forge a nation and to empower its state. At the same time, that very history also shows how sport could also work against nation-state making, reproducing and hardening local and regional forms of attachment and belonging. Sports and physical education played a significantly more effective role in the CEU eTD Collection establishment of the Romanian nation-state than current social science research has so far indicated. During the interbellum and the post WWII periods, the most pressing problem facing the Romanian ruling elite was how to consolidate the newly emerging nation and the newly 1 expanded state. The significant territorial expansion following WWI, no matter how exuberantly celebrated, posed formidable difficulties: integrating an imbalanced economy, reconciling divergent political cultures, and forging populations with radically different histories and notions of belonging into a coherent national society. Unsurprisingly, the result was an obsessive preoccupation on the part of politicians, intellectuals or journalists with “integration”. In broad brushes, from a Romanian standpoint the post-World War I “Transylvanian question,” and its post-World War II reformulation, contained the following components: first, an urban/rural divide that neatly reproduced ethnic and economic lines of separation. The countryside was overwhelmingly made of Romanian peasants, the towns were dominated by Hungarian, German and Jewish middle- and working-classes. Second, a tiny Romanian elite, mostly trained in liberal professions in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, held the sway of state power and was looking to stabilize it, secure it and advance it. In doing so, it had to navigate a fine and narrow line between local contestations from the representatives of the newly emerging “minorities” and the centralizing pretensions of the Bucharest-based elites of the Old Kingdom. Third, the relations with the minorities were complicated by the lack of Romanian trained cadres at almost any level of administration and their much stressed “disloyalty”. Hence, the skills and knowledge of ethnic minorities were often indispensable for the running of the Romanian administration and public services. At the same time, any social closeness was, seen through the lens of the dominant nationalist dogma, dubious and potentially treasonous. Fourth, the Romanian elites of the capital city pushed