National Minorities in Romania: Governmental Approach
| Author | Alina Alexandra Bot |
| Pages | 426-444 |
Alina Alexandra Bot. Ph.D. candidate, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany (e-mail: alina-alexandra.bot@s2006.tu-chemnitz.de).
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European and Euro-Atlantic integration has become universally the main aim of Central and Eastern European countries after the overthrow of communism. Adhesion to main international and European structures was seen as an important vehicle in the former communist countries' quest to achieve consolidated democracies. The Romanian government embraced “Return to Europe” as its most important foreign policy goal, as well. Not surprisingly thus, the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union and the membership conditionality of the Copenhagen criteria made the object of a series of studies (O'Brennan and Cox 2006; Amato and Batt 1998; Toggenburg 2006; Vachudova 2005).
By 2007 Romania officially became a member of the European Union having allegedly fulfilled the political and economic conditionality of the Copenhagen criteria. The aim of the paper is to critically assess the role of the state apparatus, one of the five major arenas of a modern consolidated democracy (Linz and Stepan 2001, 3-16), meant to protect and safeguard the rights of minorities in fulfilling the Copenhagen criterion of “respect for and protection of minorities”. So far scholars paid little attention to the formal mechanisms created in Romania to ensure protection for minorities in the context of the European Union integration. The paper argues that in order to produce qualitative results attention must be paid not only on the formal compliance with legal standards but also on the efficiency of the apparatus, in our case the governmental institutions created to promote and apply those standards. To achieve that goal the paper is structured in four main parts.
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The first section briefly introduces the relevance of the minority protection issue and of the state apparatus created to promote and safeguard the rights of minorities in the achievement of consolidated democracies. The section continues with presenting the existing literature regarding the institutional framework for minority protection in Romania which is not only scarce but often treated superficially.
The second part addresses minority protection at international and European level. The section is indispensable since in absence of own standard setting norms regarding minority protection the EU often advised ratification of available international and European instruments. Moreover, national policies cannot be de-contextualized since they are shaped by international and European ones.
The third part critically analyses the institutional framework of minority protection existing in Romania in the framework of the European Union integration. The emphasis is place on the governmental pillar of the state apparatus. Furthermore, the paper presents comparatively the measures undertaken by the three governing coalitions in order to show the effect of the different approaches on the institutional building for minority protection.
The conclusion of the paper naturally unfolds that an efficient state apparatus is indispensable in order to produce qualitative results.
In 2007, Romania became member of the European Union defying the sombre prognoses regarding the chances of democracy in Romania after the overthrow of communism (Huntington 1991, 278; Weiner 1994, 121; Carothers 1999, 78; Linz and Stepan 2001).
In the 1990s, Romania's prospects to become a consolidated democracy appeared gloomy and utterly unpromising. Huntington, designated Romania (alongside with Sudan1) as “deficient in the conditions that might support the maintenance of democracy” (Huntington 1991, 278). The necessary, although not exhaustive, prerequisites for a consolidated democracy included prior democratic experience, economic development, favourable international political environment, timing, mode of transition and number and severity of problems faced (idem, 270-279). One of Romania's most dangerous contextual problems was according to the prominent scholar the ethnic/communal conflict alongside with a nationalist economy (idem, 254) However, Huntington concluded that whether democracy in fact succeeded depended on the extent to which “political leaders wish to maintain it and are willing to pay the costs of doing so” (idem, 279).
By the mid 1990s Robert Weiner reiterating Huntington’s prerequisites sombrely concluded that the situation in Romania did not improve and that transition to democracy “has gotten stuck” (Weiner 1994, 121).
Linz and Stepan through a different method of analysis reached a similar pessimistic conclusion regarding the chances of democracy in Romania. The two scholars identified five interacting arenas that had to be strong for a democracy to be consolidated, including civil andPage 428 political society, rule of law, existence of a usable bureaucracy and an institutionalized economic society (Linz and Stepan 1996, 5-15). By 1995, Romania was the farthest from a consolidated democracy in sharp contrast to other post-Communist East Central European countries. It had a weak civil society, no robust governing alternative, “intermittent rule of law especially in areas concerning the human rights of minorities such as gypsies and Hungarians”, no reform of the state administration and an economic society still to be crafted (Linz and Stepan 1996, 364).
Romania, with a population of 21,6 million out of which ten percent represents minorities, is according to its constitution “a sovereign, independent, unitary, and indivisible national state”.2 Paradoxically, the ethnic conflict, one of Romania's most severe contextual problems according to Huntington (Huntington 1991, 254) is one of the most widely cited obstacles to democratic consolidation in multi-ethnic states (Linz and Stepan 2001, 102-7). Furthermore, Linz and Stepan argued that a “nation-state with other nation(s) present and awakened”3 would be under constant pressure to move towards a multinational state, there being an inconstancy between concepts such as “nation-state” and “consolidated democracy” (Linz and Stepan 2001, 16-38). The ethnic violences occurring at the beginning of the 1990s in Targu Mures between Romanian and Hungarians seemed only to confirm the sombre prognosis regarding the future of Romania and prompted worries that in search of legitimacy, the Romanian political leadership will further resort to populism and extreme nationalism (Weiner 1994, 122) with the potential of turning Romania into a new Yugoslavia.
Starting from the premisses that a consolidated democracy may be achieved if the will of the political elites is directed solely to that end (Huntington 1991, 279) and if the different arenas reach the necessary development (Linz 1996, 5-15) the paper critically assesses how the institutions created to initiate and safeguard minority protection measures contributed (or not) to the achievement of ethnic stability in Romania so as to fulfil the Copenhagen conditionality. Furthermore, at the end of the 1990s institution building into “competent, effective entities” was still according to Carothers one of the “critical difficulties of democratization” in Romania (Carothers 1999, 81).
The institutional framework for minority protection in Romania did not benefit from the broad attention granted to legislative measures for the protection of the minority groups. Most of the literature available contains either only descriptions of the institutions' attributions or cover a period stretching to the beginning of the 2000s. Thus, only seldom and rather superficially is the institutional mechanism as being directly linked to the EU conditionality presented.4 Among the contributions on the topic one has to mention two books that appeared at the initiative of the Centre for Resources for Ethno-Cultural Development that include parts tackling the institutionalPage 429 development for minority protection. Dan Oprescu in his contribution to the book “Inter-ethnic Relations in post-communist Romania” presented a severe criticism on the structures created and denounced the hypocritical approach of political leaders in what concerns minority protection at the beginning of the 1990s (Oprescu 2000). The second book “Policies for the Integration of National minorities in Romania: Legal and Institutional Aspects from a Comparative Perspective” provide an accurate historic description of the institutional framework for minority protection with an analysis of the budgetary allocations (Janosi 2008, Mohacsek 2008). Istvan Horvath dealt with the institutional framework for minority protection in Romania in his contribution to the evaluation of the effectiveness of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (Horvath 2002, 65-70). A bilingual Romanian-English guide to the institutional framework for minority protection focussing on the description of institutions' attributions is also available (Jura 2004).
A lot of ink has been spilt on the complex issue of minority protection at international and European level. At present there exists a complex legal framework addressing non-discrimination and special minority rights provisions in documents pertaining to the United Nations (UN), the Council of Europe (CoE), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and recently to the European Union, as well. It is not the intention of this paper to consider in depth the international and European standard-setting documents regarding the protection of minorities, as there...
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