After the end of the communist regime in Romania, many young Romanians, myself included, searched persistently for scholarships and exchange programs to study in Western Europe and the U.S. The phenomenon that Romanian media deplores as the “brains’ immigration” is, as usual, more complex than the label. It sounds self-evident, but it is as complex as the students’ motivations and the economic, social and intellectual conditions for their leaving. I will limit myself to talk about my itinerary through the social sciences and my personal experience of the academic travel through several countries, which finally brought me to Illinois and to the study of history.

Compared to their predecessors from the 1990s, Romanian college students of the last decade are less involved in organizing civic opposition against the new regime, considered an offshoot of communism, than with making plans for their own future, which often involves settling outside Romania. Studying abroad at European or American universities was an option for those who were planning to leave Romania, whether temporarily or for good.

Many pursued training in the social sciences and especially in political sciences in hopes of having a career in politics, civic organizations, as opinion leaders, or to work and/or study abroad. I enrolled in the Department of Political Science at the University of Bucharest having these options in mind. The department was a recent addition to the Romanian academic system, offering enough freedom to conduct research and in courses taught by young professors.

Towards the end of my undergraduate study, I realized my affinity for being a student and doing research and decided to pursue a career in academia. As I had heard about research resources from European universities, in 2003 I applied to a Masters Degree program in Nationalism Studies at Central European University in Budapest. After writing a bachelors dissertation about the political representation of national minorities in Romania, I thought this program would be appropriate to study further the issues of creating, expressing, and defending national identities. I also wanted to face the challenge of living away from home.

The Nationalism Program introduced me to a new academic system and to different expectations and criteria of academic competition. The classes emphasized inter-disciplinary preoccupations and debates. As I learned to bring temporality and change in the study of communities and communal aims and allegiances, I decided to pursue my graduate studies in history. I became interested in researching the shifting borders of the national and regional communities and the definitions of ethnicity for the individual, the states and the international organizations.

My new academic interests resonated with the day’s discussions about the accession to the European Union of a new wave of countries from the Eastern Bloc, including Hungary, with coincided with my study in the Nationalism Program. As a Romanian, even one who considered herself critical of the Romanians’ rejection of Hungary as a historical rival, I welcomed Hungary’s historical moment with mixed emotions.

As Romania was working to fulfill the accession conditions and reform its institutions, Hungary had seemingly answered the European requirements. Since 1989, some of my co-nationals feared that once Hungary became a member of the EU, Europe would endorse the Hungarian nationalists’ claims to Transylvania. Others, myself included, felt that there was a constant competition between Hungary and Romania for becoming “European” and that Hungary was, if not favored, than likely to join ahead of us. The rivalry with Hungary for European Union membership reflected the Romanians’ frustration with feeling left behind and treated as “provincial”. Paradoxically, I myself had felt like “the poor relative” back in 2001, when I was invited to a summer school program in France about “The Future of the EU: From the Treaty of Nice to the Extension”.

The program was about the history of the EU, the opportunities and challenges of the EU enlargement, and the decentralization of the European bureaucracy. The topics were interesting, but the format of the classes suggested that we had been invited to see how things functioned in “Europe”. I left with the feeling that Romania would be treated as a trainee or a laggard even long after the accession and that the candidate countries appeared to the European institutions to be more like challenges than opportunities.

Nonetheless, in May 2004, when Hungary joined the EU, Romania was, judging from the media and the politicians’ declarations, adapting fast to the European pre-accession conditions. As Romania’s accession was already foreseeable, I did not experience the old feeling of inadequacy in relation to Europe anymore. I also thought the fact that for the last one hundred years, Romanian intellectuals and politicians evaluated their country’s history, politics and economy against a distant Western ideal was partly responsible for the Romanians’ frustration with the West.

I wanted to explore that part of Romanian history that is related to the suzerainty of the non-Western Ottoman Empire, and how it might have impacted upon the country of those intellectuals and politicians who dismissed this period as a contradiction to Romania’s European vocation. Therefore, I continued my graduate studies in a history program at Sabanci University in Turkey, to become acquainted with the approaches and methods of history and to question the division between West and the rest, and what identities and ideologies went into imagining Europe and Eastern Europe.

I could observe how being at Europe’s border was experienced from Turkey and my own reaction to my Turkish colleagues, acquaintances and students, when talking about Europe. Our discussions revealed that my collocutors’ reaction to the EU conditions and calendar was similar to my own, in previous years. They were frustrated because the EU had not overcome Europe’s historical aversion towards Turkey, its’ “enemy,” and because Romania and Bulgaria, which they thought of as being economically weak, were already European Union members. They were also critical of Turkey lagging behind in the protection of minorities, or not taking responsibility for mistakes of the past and for the infringement of the freedom of speech.

Finally, I left Turkey in 2005, to begin my Ph.D at Illinois, which offered the research opportunity I had been dreaming of since I first made the decision to enter academia and study abroad. I first learned about Illinois when I decided to study history and found out that the professors whom I wanted to work with, and others whose works I was reading, were History Department faculty members. One of the largest public universities in the country with one of the largest international communities, it seemed to be the place where I could experience the U.S. while also not feeling too far from home. Unsurprisingly though, through my many travels, I am not sure what “home” means for me anymore.