Unwrapping Violent Nostalgias. The Fascist Afterlives of National Communism

Through a conjunctural analysis (Hall, 1978), this paper interrogates the ideological and mnemonic continuities between national communism and post-socialist Romanian nationalism. Analysing the discursive and iconographic registers of far-right political actors emerging out of the post-2008 conjuncture (e.g. the Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor [Alliance for the Unions of Romanians] party etc), we firstly argue that the ‘sovereignist’ political project is being constructed and legitimated through late socialist mnemonic tropes. Such revitalisation of late socialist mnemonic tropes is engendered through a complex network of historical citations and cultural iconography which reference socialist culture and national communist ideology (e.g. protochronism). On first reading, this reliance by the current far-right on the political dialects of national communism appears paradoxical, given that it is used in service of a political project entrenched in mythologies of Romania’s fascist past and anti-communist resistance. However, we further argue that such (re)emerging mnemonic tropes, and the political project they seek to energise, need not be understood as paradoxical, but as emerging precisely from the ideological and material contradictions of the peripheral, inter-imperial position of Romania. Moreover, we look beyond our national case study and trace iterations of similar seemingly paradoxical mnemonic politics within multiple postsocialist contexts, of which Hungary is the most illustrative example. Indeed, whilst the Cold War and post-2008 conjunctures are evidently different, we argue that the continuities and similarities between national communist and post-2008 nationalist discursive and iconographic expressions can be explained in reference to inter-imperial pressures. Specifically, the inter-imperial context and its material and ideological pressures enable Romanian political actors to paradoxically align themselves with Euro-colonial fascism whilst also insisting upon Romania’s and Romanians’ ethnic, cultural, and ultimately racial, exceptionalism (Țăranu, 2025).