Paper short abstract:

In contemporary Europe, new identities are being forged that fuse the liberal and the illiberal in unique configurations. This paper rectifies an absence of attention to the liberal side of this through an ethnography of romantic liberalism in rural Transylvania.

Paper long abstract:

European Union programmes of cultural and monetary integration (and their discontents) have created a space in which new European identities are being forged that fuse the liberal and the illiberal in unique configurations (Holmes 2009). Anthropological studies have tended to focus on the more illiberal variants of this, such as religious (Muehlebach 2012) and neofascist (Holmes 2000) movements, at the expense of the more liberal. This paper presents an ethnography of young cosmopolitan Romanians in the context of British-Romanian conservation and rural revitalisation initiatives to argue that we should pay more attention to new liberal identities. British conservation projects in the Saxon villages region of Transylvania have been motivated by a romantic, integralist re-imagining of the villages that sees in their way of life an escape from modern alienation. Practically, the projects have been brought into alignment with EU structures and technologies of social and economic reform. Local participants have taken up both romantic imaginaries and liberal technologies in order to contest intransigent social norms, revitalise the rural environment and provide opportunities for belonging and livelihood, against a situation of steep economic decline and massive emigration. Rethinking liberal identities requires attending to the situations against which they are a reaction and the range of liberal and non-liberal resources they draw upon. Focusing on the liberal-illiberal nexus also allows us to reconsider the importance of the much-maligned category of identity in contemporary Europe.