Southeast Europe

The Constitution of the “Socialist Republic” from 1965, written in the year Ceauşescu
came to power, contained articles which proclaimed equality in the rights for the
national minorities, and articles about the right to use one’s mother tongue in dealing
with the local administration [Articles 22 and 102] (Weber, 1998:213).
In those years, when the new power started the independence process from the Soviet
Union, the nationalism issue became an efficient ideological and propagandistic
instrument. This way the Romanian Communist Party tried to consolidate the national
unity by providing in its ideological program the idea of a homogeneous Romanian
society. They aimed to create an ethnically homogeneous nation. In order to do this they
intended to use gradual process of elimination of national differences, proclaiming
Marxism-Leninism as a means to assimilate different minorities of Romania (Pons,
1999:27).
Legally, minorities were granted certain rights and concessions under communism that
were later taken away. In practice, these rights were limited. In the area of education,
the law was actually less restrictive prior to 1989 in some areas than the law adopted
subsequently. It was theoretically possible to study a variety of subjects in the mother
tongue, although in practice the communists’ application of quotas gradually decreased
the number of such classes (see Section 6.1). Nevertheless, the Statute on Nationalities
and the Law on Education no.28/1978 granted the minorities a range of freedom under
communism that they later claimed was taken away by the new education law of 1995.
The fact of the matter is that even if the Communist regulations provided for greater
freedoms, their application had never really been successful, partly because of the above
mentioned dogmatic approach and partly because of the nationalistic feelings that
hinder even today the functioning of a truly democratic system which would respect all
minorities, including the ethnic ones.
5.2 Present
Domestic: During certain political periods since 1990, nationalistic rhetoric has been a
feature of Romanian politics. This has led to the submission of several draft bills, some
of which became legislation, which ran contrary to the provisions of the Constitution,
restricting minority rights on various levels. Certain articles were also in contradiction
with some of the international agreements signed by Romania in which the government
had made a commitment to protect minority rights. It is interesting to note that nowhere
in Romanian legislation is the term “national minority” defined, despite the fact that the
Constitution employs the term several times (Weber, 1998:199, 212).
Constitution: The current Constitution, adopted on 21 November 1991, and in force
since December 8 th 1991, makes provisions for members of national minorities in
several areas, although the references made are to individual citizens of Romania.
Collective rights are not a feature of the Constitution.
The first article declared Romania to be a nation-state whose official language is
Romanian. These things raised the problem of loyalty declared toward the Romanian
State, introducing a discriminative, anti-democratic element. The sense of “National
State”, as Andreescu notes (Andreescu, 2000), “can be interpreted, in the sense of the
European Convention on Human Rights and of the Framework Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities, in a civic sense, so as to apply to the community of
citizens rather to a community established on an ethnic basis”. Besides, the ethnic sense
of the “nation” concept is narrowed not only by the political declarations, but also by
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