Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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in the first sense. The EU does not espouse multicultural policies, even though legal, rights-based non-discrimination is intrinsic to EU legislation in an increasingly multicultural (in the first sense) EU. The few EU member states that had explicit multicultural legislation in the past, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, have replaced multiculturalism as a political strategy with measures to integrate migrants, especially Muslims.
19. The new long-term strategy, approved in December 2011, recognizes this fact in its name: ‘The Strategy for the Inclusion of Romanian Citizens from the Roma Minority’.
20. Strategia Nationala de Imbunatatire a Situatiei Romilor, Capitolul VII, 2001 (see http://www.anr.gov.ro/html/Biblioteca.html, last accessed 22 March 2010). An official report on the strategy is available at www.publicinfo.gov.ro/library/10_raport_tipar_p_ro.pdf. Romania endorsed several other related public policies, without necessarily initiating them, including: the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015, organized by the World Bank and the Open Society Institute, which involved eight East Central European states; the Common Implementation Strategy for Social Inclusion, 2005–2010, a shared policy between the EU and Romania following the Lisbon Treaty; and the National Plan for Inclusion and Eradication of Poverty, 2002–2012, one chapter of which was devoted to Roma (Preoteasa et al., eds. 2009, 34–38).
21. The number of Roma in Romania varies, depending on the source, from half a million to two million.
22. Figures from the Romanian Parliament website (http://www.cdep.ro/pls/parlam/structura.gp?leg=2008&cam=2&idg=&poz=0&idl=1, accessed 12 September 2010).
23. Wendy Brown (2006) discusses how culture can be used to undermine the very identities it is supposed to highlight, which are seen as ‘being culture’.
24. The existence of state-sponsored cultural institutions for Roma does not necessarily guarantee equal citizenship and inclusion in the nation: compare the ghettoization of Roma museums and theatres in the Czech Republic and Russia respectively. The current National Strategy for Roma (2012–2020) in Romania stipulates the creation of a Roma State Theatre and a Museum of Roma Culture and Civilization. So far only the latter has materialized, yet it is potentially marred by spatial marginalization as it is situated on the outskirts of Bucharest.
25. As Paul Gilroy (2000) argues, culture as a trope of neoliberalism ‘compounds rather than resolves the problems associating “race” with embodied or somatic variation’.
26. Arlene Dávila (2001) defines the ‘politics of suspicion’ in relation to Latinos/as in the United States, where a market-dictated construction of the Latino/a identity became the norm against which people’s authenticity was judged.
27. Aiwha Ong’s (2006) critique of the middle-class aspect of cultural diversity and the Comaroffs’ (2009) argument that class becomes erased in the neoliberal promotion of ethnic identities are relevant here.
28. Here I borrow Ann Stoler’s (2009) reworking of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ (1986). For Deleuze and Guattari minor literature is the work of minority writers who reinvent the dominant language; for Stoler minor history is made for ‘cutting’ across dominant historical narratives (9).
29. Julia Kristeva (1982) defines the abject Other as that which is expelled from the self in order to define the self.
30. See Susan Gal (1991) on nesting East–West dichotomies in Hungary.
31. Other ethnic minorities in the region, including Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and more recently Jews, relate their ethnocultural identities transnationally to other nation-states that support their diasporas (see Verdery, 1994).
32. A term meaning ‘non-Roma’ (plural) in the Romani language: gadgi (fem.; sg.) and gadgo (masc.; sg.).
33. Music similar to the very popular manele in Romania, bearing influences from an Ottoman form called mana, and which today extends into fusion styles, can be found across the Balkans in other ethnopop incarnations such as turbo folk and chalga.
Chapter 1
‘We Will Build a Beautiful Future Together’
NGO Historiography, Roma Culture and Monoethnic Nationalism
We must tell our children that, six decades ago, children just like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of starvation and cold. We must tell mothers in Romania that the Romanian state killed Roma mothers through subjugation and misery. We must also mention that Roma men fighting for the homeland were taken out of the army and sent between Denester and Bug. Education in Romania has the duty to inform and teach the new generations about the Holocaust, just as it has a duty to talk about the period of Roma slavery or about the crimes of Communism.
—Patrasconiu, ‘Exterminarea Ţiganilor’
So went former Romanian President Traian Băsescu’s address for Holocaust Memorial day on 22 October 2007, when he decorated three Holocaust survivors with the National Order of Faithful Service. Denester and Bug, mentioned in his speech, are the two rivers (in present-day Ukraine) that mark the territory where an estimated 25,000 Roma were deported by the Romanian state during World War II and approximately 11,000 lost their lives. Those who returned, including the three survivors decorated at the event, had never before been considered Holocaust victims, as Romania had failed to acknowledge its contribution to the Holocaust until recent EU negotiations and pressure from Israel. The President’s speech included a few sentences in Romani, and a plea to the EU: ‘We need a European policy for Roma. … There is, of course, a need for financial resources, because, for the time being, since the revolution, the funds allocated for the social inclusion of Roma have been insignificant’ (Patrasconiu 2009, no page number). Băsescu ended his remarks with an apology and a promise for the future: ‘Forgive us, brothers and sisters, and we will build a beautiful future together’.
In this chapter I focus on the 2002 Roma Fair held at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest – one of the first events on a national scale representing Roma culture post-1989 – and on political debates before and after EU accession about Roma slavery and the Roma Holocaust. I show how Romanian institutions and officials moulded Roma identity through spatial marginalization and commodification, demonstrated at the Roma Fair in the tension between the museum itself and the marginal spaces assigned to the Roma activists and participants.