Politics of Eternity, Messianism and Liberal Democracy: Shapes and Waves of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Political Thought. Between the 'West and the Rest'?1.

During the nineteenth century, South-Eastern Europe experienced a complicated construction of a new unity of political beliefs: the sacred unity of nationhood and national community. It was a visible and tangible scope of the political thought in the Romanian Principalities and a joined effort in absorbing a new mode of sacralised markers in secular institutions. Identified and put in texts and revolutionary discourse, the new secular religion takes over, influenced by a vast and intricated web of cultural and philosophical transfers. French reactionary thought, Vico's Nuova Scientia, the penetrating force of a new Orthodox unifying virtues, all come together in constructing a political rhetoric based more on believing and confessing the new faith than institutionalizing secular politics. Shaping the Romanian sacralised modernity is not very different from the similar process unfolding in important parts of East Central Europe. And the main instrument used in order to obtain that type of motivation was the messianic view of the political construction of democracy itself, namely by the invention of the New History which dominated the methodological approaches during the long nineteenth century and operated on the perception and dealings with Historical Time and messianic and providential structures of Chronos. The main aim of the present article is to discuss, with examples, the beginning of this narrative in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the basis of Romanian political literature inspired mainly, but not exclusively, by the French and the Greek models, with consideration given to the degree of relevance of such texts, including pamphlets, short stories or history essays. The study of such grand mutations in the methodological perception of time and its different political usages implies a transdisciplinary analysis, more than ever in times such as ours, when the memory and the historical past are converted into political tools daily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]