Uncivic Values: An Archival Lens on the Continuity of Romani Exclusion

• In Event: Nationalism, Patriotism, and Exclusionary Identities

Abstract

This study relies on an archival analysis of the Securitate (secret Police) files in Romania to provide an insight into the conceptual framework which guided the communist state regarding the Romani (G*psy) minority in Romania, and connect that framework with post-1989 attitudes and policies. This analysis captures the way in which institutional frameworks create an economy of knowledge which constructs and props “uncivic values” that are infused into political culture through propaganda and then carried across political changes (even revolutionary ones). The communist economy of knowledge captured in the Securitate archives is centered on a “deficit discourse” that presents the Roma as failing the putative standards of the state and promote a view of Romani ethnicity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, recalcitrant to “useful work” and parasitic. This framing required the disciplining of the Romani population through a collective project of “reeducation.” These standards of (un)civic behavior promoted by the state amounted to coercive social and political practices against the Roma, and had a lasting effect. Post-1989 policies and social attitudes remained contiguous with historical patterns of exclusion, and focused on “fixing the Roma” instead of addressing institutional and societal factors of marginalization. The continuity of patterns of exclusion after 1989 in not explained solely by the thesis of economic scapegoatism, but it is rather a specific instance of targeting that has firm roots in the communist discourse of nationalist chauvinism related specifically to the Roma.

Author

• Delia Popescu, Le Moyne College