ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the exploration of the entry of Central/Eastern Europe into international society by examining the ways in which the translatio imperii idea informed the 19th-century nation-building project in two Romanian principalities: Moldavia and Wallachia. It briefly explores the ways in which some of the elements of the nation-building narrative employed in the 19th century were also mobilized after 1989 to gain support for Romania's (re)entry into European society. In the collective memory of 19th-century Wallachian and Moldavian intellectuals and politicians, the theme of Roman origins was closely linked to the image of Romanians as defenders of Europe against numerous others – particularly the Ottomans. The theme of differentiation from/civilizational superiority to the Ottomans became especially important in Romanian self-definition, in a situation in which, as Neumann and Welsh have demonstrated, the Ottomans occupied a particularly powerful discursive position in European processes of identity construction – as the inferior other against which Europe could define itself.
