Playing to Win, Learning to Lose: Sport, Nation and State in Interwar Romania - PhD defense of Florin Faje

PhD defense of Florin Faje

Dissertation Examination Committee:

Chair: Balázs Trencsényi, Associate Professor at the Department of History, CEU

Supervisor: Dan Rabinowitz, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

Internal examiner: Don Kalb, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

External examiner: Irina Culic, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Babes-Bolyai University

Abstract:

My dissertation explores the role of sport in the making of the modern Romanian nation-state. It argues that sport and physical education have been instrumental for national unification, national integration and for the consolidation of the Romanian state. I show how these pressures operated to produce a distinctively Romanian sporting tradition premised on the Romanians perceived Latin “élan”. 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. In this context, I show how sports and physical education were taken up and encouraged by members of the Romanian elite in their effort to affirm Romanianness. This process was nowhere more visible 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. To explore the critical and often neglected role of sport in the making of the Romanian nation-state the current work builds 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. In conjunction with national developments, 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, 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 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.