The insistence on the need to develop the self-consciousness of the Romanian people on all spheres of life was an early and persistent theme in Ceausescu's cultural policy. The theoretical vehicle for this development first emerged with Athanase Joja's concept of "national specificity", which emphasized the uniqueness and special characteristics of Romanian culture. As Ceausescu's goals came to encompass a global role, Joja's concept was replaced by the theory of "protochronism", which emphasized not just the uniqueness but also the superiority of Romanian culture over all other cultures. For Ceausescu, national culture was a tool for comparison and confrontation.
Edgar Papu's essay, "The Romanian Protochronism", caught Ceausescu's eye in 1974. He adopted the idea of Romanian chronological (and hence cultural) superiority as a tool to expand the intellectual reach of national socialism. At the 11th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party a few months later, Ceausescu's chief ideologues linked protochronism to Marxism with the argument that the Dacians created a permament and unorganized State, the seed which later sprouted into the Greater Romanian nation.
At the Cultural Congress of 1976, Ceausescu stressed the need to rewrite Romanian history in a way that would correct the "grave errors [which] have been made in the interpretation of our history, of the formation of our people, of the language, and of the Romanian nation itself" (Scienteia, 3 June 1976).
Most Romanian academics hailed Ceausescu's statement as an opportunity to embolden Romanian national history and culture, previously given shorter shrift by Stalin's emphasis on the Soviet Union's primary role in world history. Those on the political and nationalist Right were especially pleased with Ceausescu's speech, as it turned the Romanian Communist Party into a national socialist state founded in a xenophobic, right-wing glorification of ethnic history. Protochronism led Romania away from the internationalism and global brotherhood suggested by Marx and other socialist theorists and back towards the fascist militarism so lamentable popular in last war. The Russians were not models for Romania after all, as Romania would pursue its own special and superior path to socialism.
Some academics, however, were not comfortable with this direction. Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu and Nicolae Manolescu protested the theory of protochronism. Apart from the warning that "every forced note risks sounding shrill", Crohmalniceanu and Manolescu disparaged even the term chosen to denote protochronism, as it was created in obvious counterpoint to Eugen Lovinescu's theory of synchronism launched in the 1920's. Papu's paper had suggested that Lovinescu's goal of "synchronization" with the West between the two world wars prevented the Romanians from discovering their own magnificence. Papu's critics knew better-- the protochronist theory would only institutionalize Ceausescu's totalitarianism even deeper by drawing disaffected Romanian right-wingers (who might have formed an opposition) into the folds of Romanian national socialism.
For more on Romanian protochronism:
- Maier, Anneli, "Romanian Protochronism and the New Cultural Order" (RAD Background Report #226, 16 November 1977).
- Mocanescu, Alice, "National Art As Legitimate Art: National Between Tradition and Ideology in Ceausescu's Romania" (Conference paper).
- Gavrila, Bogdan Cristian, "The Political Discourse of National Communism 1971-1979" (The Dept. of Nationalism Studies, CEU, 2004).
- Martin, Mircea, "Cultural romana intre comunism si nationalism II" (Revista 22, 31 October 2002).
