The title of the volume (Dead End) refers to the evolution of the politics regarding the Hungarian minority. After World War II – except the classic Stalinist period from the first part of the 1950s – the RCP was heading towards a Romanian state-building and nation-building paradigm. In the second part of the Ceaușescu regime, due to the changing mechanisms of inner power and to the influences of external politics, the communist leadership dropped the patterns of nationality politics of the previous periods of time. The RCP was raising the flag of a homogeneous Romanian society and the future image of a `socialist nation`. After most of the Jews and Germans from Romania had left the country, Ceaușescu started an open assimilation politics towards the Hungarians as well.   Contrary to the success of the Romanian nation-building process, the minority politics regarding Hungarians and the fate of the Transylvanian Hungarians arrived to a dead end. Because of the assimilation politics, the restricted network of their own cultural and educational institutions,  with the loss of social positions, in the second part of the 1980s the Hungarians from Romania could not hope for the better within the frames of the Romanian socialist system.

The documents included in the present volume can give a hand in the understanding of the minority politics towards Hungarians in the period between 1974-1989.