OTHERNESS AS A EUROPEAN DESTINY. INTERWAR ROMANIAN VIEWS ON THE EUROPEAN IDEA VALENTINA PRICOPIE ∗ ABSTRACT This paper summarises some of the interwar Romanian conceptions of the European idea, from its emotional heyday around 1918, to the exiled involvement in the building of the European consciousness and the conception of a new project for Europe after the Second World War (1947). It underlines the intrinsic European dimension of Romanian national identity building in relation to Romania’s Eastern otherness, a Latin country placed at the very border between Western and Eastern cultures. The paper aims to document journalistic, academic, and diplomatic insights into the idea of Europe in interwar Romania, along with their reverberations within the exiled project of Romania’s European continuity at the end of the Second World War. Keywords: Idea of Europe, Interwar Romania, Eastern Otherness, Federalism, Project of a United Europe. INTRODUCTION According to Edgar Morin, conflict was at the basis of the rise of “European consciousness” after the Second World War, stating that previous “order” of Europe was in fact the “disorder of a tumultuous chantier” (Morin 2002 [1990]), 64) whereby European culture(s) and European civilisation had extended their influence throughout the world. A “common market of ideas” had emerged, and a “polycentric cultural Europe” (ibidem, 69) – this new “reality” of the continent – had started to transgress national borders and languages1. With regard to interwar Romania, Adrian Marino claimed it had experienced a socio-cultural “spontaneous ∗ Senior researcher 1st degree, Social Europe Research Laboratory, Institute of Sociology, Romania. E-mail:
[email protected]. 1 Morin also noticed that the contemporary European pleiade of reference writers were writing in their languages, but they were all speaking “European”.