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

Olga Cojocaru
Having a blue passport means not having a red one yet
stages of the bureaucratic procedure in order
to register their request (3); accede in the category
of people endowed with rights and papers
in order (4) and, in addition, due to their
new status, they are double citizens with two
passports, more equal than others, since they
can benefi t from larger advantages when combining
the two citizenships (5).
The primary question of this study is what
would be the signifi cance these papers are invested
with beyond their materiality. A passport
is par excellence a travel document that allows
citizens to leave temporarily/permanently the
national territory. Even so, the identity documents
are issued only after a series of bureaucratic
procedures which mediate ultimately
the link between individual and institution/
authorities. In the recent decades, the world we
are living in has more fl uid boundaries, leading
to an unprecedented degree of mobility.
However, freedom of mobility is unevenly distributed.
Visa restrictions are one of the main
mechanism by which nation-states exercise
their prerogative to control the entries and exits
from the country (Salter, 2003). Therefore, Stef
Jansen (2009) conceptualized the emotional
implications entailed in the regulation of certain
areas of mobility and humiliating captivity
caused by the visa required documentation. In
the same key, the British author Navaro-Yashin
(2007, 95) theorized interactions between documents
and persons, how documents, as emotionally
invested phenomena, are perceived
and experienced when they are produced and
traded in specifi c contexts of social relationships
(apud Jansen 2009).
Freedom of movement for those within the
circumscribed space of Schengen space was
achieved at the expense of those left outside
the protected walls. Thus a new syntagma begun
to circulate after the Ukrainian President
Leonid Kuchma warned that a “Paper Curtain”
was being erected in Europe, replacing
the Iron Curtain “more humane, but no less
dangerous”. Visa operates a preselection and
discourages mobility. Those who need visas
are viewed ab initio as undesirable, those who
need a visa and got the approval of it are perceived
as non-undesirable only after the result
of rigorous inspections, and those who need
and do not obtain visas are labeled as totally
undesirable presences in that state (Neumayer,
2005, 5)
I built my theoretical approach based on the
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distinction identifi ed by Bakewell (2000) of
heartfelt and handfelt citizenship. The fi rst one
acts as a datum that can not be changed and is
usually discussed in terms of shame and pride.
The second one changes slightly, depending on
the context and circumstances and it is defi ned
according to documents and spatial location.
Methodologically, this paper relies on a
qualitative research approach in which data
were collected through qualitative life story
type interviews, by which I tried to point out
certain episodes/ signifi cant experiences relevant
to the topic (the consulate queues, oath,
customs). I attempted through interviews to
fi nd out how does it feel to be Romanian without
a without a legal proof/ passport and then
how does it feel to be Romanian “with papers
in order”. I was also interested in the meanings
of Moldovan, Romanian and Transnistrian
passports while trying to decipher how do
identities interfere in relation with others (what
is the working/ dominant identity, which one
remains in shadow). I have pointed to the contextual
use of passport and parallel/ concurrent
practices of citizenship, functional ambiguity
of identity documents (one does not which
passport to use and when to use). The conversations
resulted in a number of complex life
stories with signifi cant episodes. Otherwise,
the discussion about citizenship inevitably attracted
in equation notions as identity, homeland,
statehood, language, history, EU and others,
even if they were not directly concerned in
the questions posed.
Entrapment
Among the most recurrent thematizations is
the entrapment situation caused by excessive
bureaucracy and “consular sadism” 3 . The situation
of entrapment/ captivity is suggested by
the inability to exit the limits of the country
without going through the formalities of registration
with proper documents. The territory
is demarcated and all the entries and exits are
regulated by specifi c control procedures. “We
are surrounded by customs, in order to go
somewhere one needs to go through customs
and if they don’t have proper documents...”
(Vera4 , Transnistrian5 resident). If Transnistrians
feel surrounded by customs, the inhabitants
of Republic of Moldova also have comparable
reasons to feel captive in the immediate vicinity
of the EU. Until they come into the pos-