Tourism and national identity in multicultural cities: Romanian and Hungarian representations of Cluj-Napoca in guidebooks

The study explores the relationship between geopolitics and tourism through the case of Cluj-Napoca, with a focus on processes of subject formation. The site was selected for two reasons: (1) the city is currently located in Romania but was part of Hungary before 1920 and remains ethnically divided between a Romanian majority and a Hungarian minority; (2) it has transformed from a post-communist industrial centre into a neoliberal IT hub. Through an analysis of Romanian and Hungarian-language guidebooks published over the past 100+ years (11 guidebooks, 1903–2018), I conducted a discourse analysis of both narrative and visual content, focusing on explicit nationalist elements, discursive contestations over historical heritage, and representations of communist ideology. The findings indicate that while Hungarian-language materials have remained unchanged in their portrayal of the city’s identity, Romanian-language materials have shifted markedly from nation-building narratives toward more multicultural and inclusive framings. This discursive transformation is accompanied, however, by what Simon Harrison terms the symbolic appropriation of cultural heritage. The study argues that Hungarian tourists from Hungary emphasize Cluj’s heritage as part of the Hungarian nation; while Romanian tourists historically emphasized ethnic character under national communism, more recently they focus on integrating the city into a European, multicultural civil identity.