In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that what we say and do, even when we seem to be engaged with a second person, is determined by a third party. When one man scales the Reichstag with a Soviet flag and another takes his picture, both are thinking of the third party, the viewer of the photograph. The third party is simultaneously “there,” since it is not in the same time and place as we, but also “here,” since it is in our minds, inflecting our choices and our actions. For Sartre, our existence depends upon our stance toward this third party. On the one hand, if we ignore the third party, we will dissipate into irrelevance. On the other hand, if we adjust our actions excessively, we dissolve ourselves into the third party.

On the basis of impeccable research in multiple languages, and with a clear mind and lucid pen, Holly Case has written an existential account of nationalism. In her account of the international relations of Transylvania during World War II, Transylvania is not a place, but a question. The question is: Which state, Hungary or Romania, will possess Transylvania and thus fully exist? Transylvania was granted to Romania after World War I, but then Hitler divided it between Hungary and Romania in 1940. The next year both Hungary and Romania joined Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union. They did so, Case argues very convincingly, because Romanian leaders wished for the return of lost Northern Transylvania, and Hungarian leaders wished to keep that very gain. What might seem like an issue of Hungarian-Romanian relations, Case shows, is in fact a matter of a common Hungarian-Romanian appeal to a third party, namely, Nazi Germany. If Hungary and Romania were somehow the only two relevant parties, they would themselves have fought for Transylvania: as they did, very late, when it was clear that Nazi Germany would be defeated and after Romania had switched sides.

Thus Hungary and Romania pose a question together, but they cannot answer it themselves. In the conviction of Hungarian and Romanian leaders, their states cannot exist without Transylvania, and thus they must engage the “Transylvanian question,” which involves making similar appeals to Berlin. On the other hand, they must not yield entirely to the bidding of Nazi Germany, because becoming the third party is the other way that existence ends. Thus Hungary and Romania, even as or indeed precisely as allies of Nazi Germany, were sovereign states pursuing interests distinct from those of Berlin. Thus, as Case shows, it is impossible to explain Romanian and Hungarian wartime policies toward Jews only by reference to prewar anti-Semitism or wartime Nazi policy. Budapest and Bucharest alike were always reacting to pressures from a third party, but they were also (because wars come and go but the “Transylvanian question” remains) aware that Nazi Germany might not always be that third party. In some future peace settlement, Germany might be only one participating power or might indeed be entirely absent. Budapest and Bucharest were aware that the Western Allies might judge their behavior. Thus Hungary, despite prewar anti-Jewish laws, did not dispatch its Jews to the death factories until Germany occupied the country in 1944. Romania undertook its own policies of the mass murder of Jews in 1941 when the Romanian army invaded the Soviet Union but reversed them in 1942. Romania did not send its Jews to the German death facilities.

In Case's analysis, the existential question is Transylvania, the first two parties are Hungary and Romania, but the third party is not really Nazi Germany—instead, it is Europe. Although she devotes the book almost entirely to the period 1941–1944, Case would like to see the war, apparently an exceptional period, as a continuation of the basic existential position. The brief treatment of the periods before 1940 and after 1944 is not really sufficient to demonstrate this provocative claim. Once Transylvania ceased to be a place and became a question (by the end of the nineteenth century, in Case's account), Romanians and Hungarians had to be concerned with those powers whom they saw as constituting Europe. Europe, the third party, is thus the Great Powers before World War I, the victorious Entente in 1918 and twenty years thereafter; but then Germany after Hitler showed that he had the power to change the borders between European states at Munich in 1938. What is certainly constant, as Case shows, is that Budapest and Bucharest had to attend to these different instances of “Europe.” It is less clear that these instances of Europe, and especially those that followed, were quite so similar, even from the perspective of Bucharest and Budapest, as Case maintains.

Case begins by arguing that small states matter. They certainly matter to themselves and to their citizens. Romanian and Hungarian citizens died in the hundreds of thousands on the front and in the tens of thousands in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. Other Romanian and Hungarian citizens, Jews, died in the hundreds of thousands because institutions of the state killed them or sent them to their deaths. But in emphasizing the centrality of the “Transylvanian question,” and exaggerating the similarity of the various instances of Europe, Case ends up making her subject Romanian and Hungarian perspectives. These perspectives do explain decisions in Bucharest and Budapest, but they do not show that these decisions constituted Europe. The third party, in Case's account, makes its own rules. Hungarian and Romanian agency is limited, its expression self-destructive. From a European perspective, the participation of Hungary and Romania in the war on the Soviet Union looks like effective Nazi diplomacy, the mastery of small states by a great power.

When Europe changes, Romanian and Hungarian policies change, too. In more respects than Case elucidates in her conclusion, the European Union does embody a different kind of Europe than did Nazi Germany, not only on its own terms, but also in the perceptions of Romanians and Hungarians. Whereas admission to the Axis involved taking part in border changes, admission to the European Union required treating existing state boundaries as sacrosanct. Alliance with Germany meant limited participation in someone else's quest for colonial autarchy; membership in the European Union meant access to markets. Case's claims about the substantial continuity of ideas of Europe are not actually necessary for her more fundamental argument: that the “Transylvanian question,” though apparently regional or national, cannot be described in any framework smaller than the European. There she succeeds, and thereby creates a form of analysis that every student of nationality and nationalism will have to consider.