Historically Extractive. National Communism, the Romanian Far-right and the Populist Labour of Nostalgia

In August 1980, celebrations for the 2050th anniversary of the first Dacian state are organised on a Bucharest stadium, with communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu solemnly receiving the ceremonial blessing of an actor embodying its founder, ancient leader Burebista (Deletant 2019). Four decades later, then far-right activist George Simion publishes a Facebook video disclosing a prospective political project. Filmed among the ruins of the Dacian capital of Sarmizegetusa, it showcases Simion being welcomed by an actor resembling the same Burebista, who encourages his contemporary counterpart in his sovereignist fight for national dignity. Officially founded later that year, Simion’s party Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor (AUR) [Alliance for the Union of Romanians] becomes the central far-right populist player on the domestic political scene, surprisingly entering parliament in the 2020 elections (Țăranu and Crăciun 2023). Much like the early campaigning of its leader, the political communication of AUR exemplifies what I call historical extractivism: the laborious practice of annexing historical citations and cultural iconography to enhance political legitimacy and populist appeal. References to socialist-era historical films, to the local leaders of interwar fascism, and to the American Republican Party overlap in the formulaic narrative of revanchist nationalism advanced by AUR across multiple media. Contextualising this varied repertoire and tracing its indebtedness to communist cultural tropes is the main aim of my presentation. Thus, I nuance the historical dualism which posits AUR against its symbolic predecessors, the interwar far-right (Gheorghiu and Praisler, 2022), by reading the party’s use of historical imagery against the backdrop of communist cultural autarchy and the divided reception of socialist culture following 1989. I trace how the Ceaușescu-era cultural and historiographic policy of protochronism trickles down into AUR’s current chronopolitics (Taș 2020) and its often contradictory administration of the historical past. To illustrate, I engage the digital scenography of the party’s electoral campaign, with a specific focus on how it recycles the Grand National Epics (GNEs) made in the 1960s and the 1970s, thus recycling the iconography of national heroes consecrated by socialist historiography. I then discuss the ideological production of protochronism – with the Great National Epic as its quintessential genre – and its anticommunist critics, showcasing how the postsocialist historiography of communism enabled the mobilization of these cultural artefacts in the illiberal memory politics of the contemporary far-right. My main aim is to interrogate the ambivalent relationship of this anticommunist party with communist nationalism, which is both discursively shunned and nostalgically mimicked. Lastly, I bring in the theoretical framework of ‘late fascism’ (Toscano 2023) as nostalgic towards the synchronicity of Fordist modernity. I argue that the electoral appeal of AUR’s historical extractivism is not exclusively tied to nostalgia for a nativist utopia, or to a glorification of the communist regime, but rather stems from a nostalgia towards the ideology of national progress and modernization that socialist historiography embodied.