This book written by Cristian Cercel marks an important step forward in understanding complex processes such as Europeanization, cultural interaction, and social change. Beginning with the subtitle, Cercel intends to put forward a puzzling problem when it comes to explaining ethnic relations, imagined communities, and electoral behavior, namely philo-Germanism without Germans in Romania. By emphasizing this issue, Cercel attempts to grasp a very broad perspective by moving from the peculiar electoral curiosity of ethnic Romanians electing a German candidate in a medium-size town in Transylvania, to the way westernization and Europeanization concur in shaping Romanian identity. The preference for an ethnic German candidate in a city almost deserted by its German-speaking citizens sheds light on the broader phenomenon of intimate self-colonization, fueled by a power discourse on the shaping of Romanian identity as forged by numerous interactions and representations in a very complex ethnic, social, and political environment.

In fact, the starting point of the inquiry is the electoral victory of a German-speaking candidate in the 2000 mayoral elections in the city of Sibiu, in the multi-ethnic province of Transylvania, which before 1918 was part of the Hapsburg Empire. The surprise continued with the successive re-election of the same candidate, Klaus Iohannis, in 2004, 2008, and 2012 as mayor of Sibiu and with his election in 2014 as President of Romania, followed by his re-election in 2019. The surprise comes from the unusual electoral behavior of Romanian electors, who generally do not cross ethnic boundaries when it comes to voting. This is to say that in normal political interactions between ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians from Transylvania, for example, ethnically-defined parties rely exclusively on their ethnic bases. Their interaction shapes the symbolic configuration of the shared space in ethnically mixed cities from the region (see Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, 2006).

The author presents the preference for a German-speaking candidate in relation with the outstanding prestige associated with German ethnicity in post-communist Romania. The numerous sociological surveys, interviews, and anthropological and oral fieldwork mentioned by the author have documented the existence of a cultural model praising Germanness, and wishing the spill-over of their genuine qualities: ethnic Germans being generally depicted as hard-working, trustful, and honest. But when it comes to depicting Germanness in today's Romania, there is very little concern for making a difference between various German-speaking historical communities and intra-regional German speaking differences. As mentioned by the author in Chapter 3, a long process of self-identification and unification of German-speaking populations has occurred during the last eight centuries, with waves of German-speaking people migrating into what is today the territory of the Romanian state. Although the first colonists are well known under the name Saxons, who colonized the south of Transylvania in the twelfth century, other population movements took place since then. The incoming “Germans” were different in dialect, religion, and place of origin. Moreover, during a time and of political changes of territories and borders, German-speaking communities changed status from an autonomous, mostly-urban community in the Middle Ages to the political status of ordinary citizens and a cultural minority in ethnically-defined states, as was Austria-Hungary until 1918 and Romania has been since then. A complex process of migration to the Federal Republic of Germany, taking place following the end of World War II and accelerating since 1989, almost turned Germanness in Romania into an empty category.

The current favorable image of the German-speaking population and the lack of distinction between past developments, including the inherent conflicts in ethnically-mixed urban settings or between Romania and Germany in both World Wars, tells another story. This is the story of a long-lasting Romanian quest for European identity, an effort to define ethnicity and statehood in a region marked by both ethnic competition and anti-colonial struggle. The current philo-Germanism without Germans is strongly connected with Romanian aspirations toward Europeanization, an effort to overcome cultural, social, and political dilemmas of being caught between east and west. They have been troubling for a long time for the contemporary state of Romania, forged by a Romanian nation that was previously subject to multinational empires. That is why the author rightfully emphasizes the ongoing self-identification mechanisms by using the concepts of Orientalism and self-Orientalization for the long-lasting process of modernization in Romania.