Citizenship and Identity: Being Hungarian in Slovakia and Romanian in Serbia and Ukraine (original) (raw)
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Nationalities Papers The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 2018
Identity has been treated in relevant literature predominantly as a dynamic, fluid, multidimensional, and ongoing process. Currently, identity is viewed as a process, as something achieved, and as a product of social relations. Scholars have acknowledged that members of minorities and diasporas can have very complex multiple identities, which are both dependent on social context and changeable over time. This article explores the national and ethnic identifications of Slovaks living in Serbia. Its main objective is to examine how the members of the Slovak diaspora identify themselves and what kind of national and ethnic awareness and pride they hold. As well, this paper explores their opinions and attitudes on language and cultural identity. This study used a web-based survey and basic statistics. The results of the explorative study indicate that members of the Slovak diaspora living in Serbia have multiple identities that coexist, do not conflict, and vary in their importance for respondents. Distinct national and ethnic identifications are perceived in different ways and have divergent emotional intensities. This study proposes further research on the importance of civic and ethnic values and on different perceptions of identity, citizenship, length of residency, and minority rights for collective identifications of minorities and/or diasporas.
The article comparatively analyses national identifications of Hungarian minorities living in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia (Voivodina) and Ukraine, their ethnic and national attitudes and intergroup relations, including the ethnonational minority -majority relationship, and attitudes towards Hungary and the Roma community. Of interest is the presence and extent of ingroup-outgroup differentiation, and possible cross-national differences and similarities in national attitudes, identity, and perceived social distance. I examined the following two research hypotheses: (1) The Hungarian community in a given country identifies closer with other Hungarian communities living in the diaspora than with Hungarians in Hungary, or the majoritarian population in their country of citizenship.
This article investigates how two processes of externalization-deeper integration into European institutions, and the extension of citizenship and voting rights offered by neighboring kin-states-impact national minority politics using the critical case of the ethnic Hungarian political community in Romania. It finds that external citizenship and voting rights may help strengthen ethnic political identity, but also reorients resources away from minority political projects toward the kin-state and encourages intra-minority stratification. Access to European political spaces offers additional arenas through which minority political actors can make claims and gain allies, but is of limited use as a mobilizational resource.
Populism, Memory and Minority Rights, 2018
In 2010, Hungary modified its citizenship legislation, making it possible for Hungarians living in neighbouring countries to obtain extraterritorial citizenship. In this paper, I seek to explain the lack of Romanian resistance and countermeasures to the Hungar-ian legislation, suggesting that Romania has moved towards a post-Westphalian concept of sovereignty and away from a territorially-bounded notion of what constitutes a national community. I investigate the Romanian public perception of existing minority rights and Hungarian ethnic claims, as well as the relationship between the Hun-garian citizenship legislation and the claims of the Transylvanian Hungarian political elite for minority rights and autonomy. Relying on empirical studies and surveys on how the ethno-national majority in Romania perceives the minority rights of Tran-sylvanian Hungarians and the Hungarian kin-state policy, I assert that it is primarily an empirical question whether national majorities see minority autonomy and extraterritorial citizenship offered by the kin-state as conflicting strategies.
Citizenship and National Identity in Romania: A Historical Overview
2002
R ecently, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of citizenship, in an interdisciplinary effort of political scientists and historians, anthropologists and sociologists. 1 Challenged by socio-political developments in the post-Communist and post-Maastricht era, numerous scholars have reexamined established definitions of citizenship and their relationship with issues of identity, civil society and the foundations of democracy. However, as Bryan Turner has rightfully pointed out, the growing body of scholarly works on citizenship has concentrated overwhelmingly on theoretical aspects, so that the history of the institution of citizenship in western and Eastern Europe has still remained largely underreearched. 2 This article is designed as a first historical overview of Romanian citizenship legislation from 1866 up to the present, a subject that has received so far a limited scholarly attention. 3 It focuses on the historical roots of the institu-1 From the vast scholarly production on citizenship in the last decade, I can mention selectively the works of:
Perceived Co-Ethnicss and Kin-State Citizenship in Southeastern Europe
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
The paper analyses the often neglected 'perceived co-ethnics' in the analysis of citizenship policies. The paper argues this is an interstitial category that further complicates the triadic nexus between national minorities, nationalizing states and kin-states. Apart from bringing the perceived co-ethnics issue into the focus, the paper elucidates citizenship policies affecting groups that challenge the exact fit between ethnicity and nation; showing how national governments through particular citizenship policies and categorisation practices engage in construction of groups. The paper shows that the triadic nexus framework which has had a strong influence on citizenship and minorities scholarship needs to be revised in some aspects and include unidirectional relations between the elements of the triadic nexus. The paper is based on the comparison between the cases of ethnic Vlachs and Bunjevci in the context Albania, Croatia, Greece and Serbia.