The processes leading to international collaborations and supranational integration projects, as well as the reappearance of meso-level territorial structures, namely ‘regions’, have swept across Europe and beyond. In the troubled context of postwar reconstruction, this call for cooperation and peaceful ethnic coexistence distinguished the PCR and its allies from the opposition parties and significantly contributed to make early communist rule more acceptable to large masses of Romanians and non-Romanians, as well. Unlike the Romanian historical parties and the Hungarian nationalists, the PCR and the Petru Groza-led coalition government behaved as a transnational body and pursued integrative policies. In multiethnic Transylvania the ethnic power balance consciously created by PCR with Soviet assistance helped the party to strengthen its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. At that time a marginal political force, traditionally ruled by non-Romanian elements and devoted to the strictest internationalism, turned national without falling into discrimination against minority groups, with the exception of the Germans. PCR became a national mass party immediately after the coup d’état of 23 August 1944. While mainstream explanations still focus on factors of change motivated by external (Soviet) pressure and stress that violence, coercion, and intimidation have been main instruments used by the Communist Party to implement its goals, the author argues that a reevaluation of the real extent of popular support is needed. Such an attempt deserves a new analytical explanation of the highly controversial notions of institutional continuity and of "nationalization" of its membership. This article analyzes the communist takeover in Romania as the successful outcome of a long-term policy aiming to make the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) a national force. The decisive shift from a class dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional state-building ideologies In 1960 the HAR also suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. The management of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for the far larger “nationalization” of the Romanian communist regime which, starting from the late 1950s, resulted in “ethnicized” communism, an aim achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. On the other hand, the Romanian central power used the region as an instrument of political and social integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen-with Soviet assistance-its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in the summer of 1952.
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