State, community, individual - Societal and Political Psychology ...

Having a blue passport means
not having a red one yet.
Ethnographic approach of the
acquisition of Romanian citizenship
Olga Cojocaru 1
Abstract: Lately a growing number of Moldovans have applied for the Romanian citizenship.
This paper aims to reverberate the representations of a number of Moldovan students
in Romania, who – after a laboriously bureaucratic procedure and a liminal citizenship
interval – have gained the Romanian citizenship and a second passport, becoming not
only dual citizens but also holders of a dual status: insiders and outsiders of Europe. As
Heintz showed (2007), holding a blue Moldovan passport means par excellence an interim
situation. I have pointed to the contextual utilizations of passports and the alternative exercise
of the parallel citizenship statuses resulting ultimately in the functional ambiguity
of the identity papers.
Keywords: visa regime, restricted mobility, dual citizenship, identity papers.
Preamble
More than one million out the 3-4 million of
Moldova’s inhabitants fi nd themselves in the
coincidental position as outsiders and insiders
of EU. This happens because, on the one side,
Romanian government grants citizenship on request
to Moldovans (on ethnical grounds), and
on the other side, Moldovan authorities allow
the dual citizenship 2 . My approach is prompted
by the observation that the most common answer
to the question “What does it mean to be
a citizen of the Republic of Moldova today?”
is “to have a blue passport” (Heintz, 2007). I
attempted to confront the chromatic representation
of Moldovan citizenship with a competing
chromatic representation, which is the
Romanian burgundy red passport in the context
of the massive phenomenon of Romanian
naturalization of Moldovans. If the passport is
a tool by which the state regulates the mobility
of citizens, what would be the relationship with
this document and, moreover, what changes in
relation to this travel document when one gets
a second passport which gives them a series of
additional benefi ts that could not be accessed
with the fi rst passport? Hence, in this paper I
tried to address the plight of Moldovans known
for their identity dilemmas who fi nd themselves
entrapped at the gates of Europe, especially
after Romania’s accession to EU, as the
mobility is rigorously controlled (1); prepare
the documents package in order to acquire the
Romanian citizenship (2); go through all the
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