Our volume offers an in-depth, multidisciplinary analysis of the major social and political processes affecting Hungarians in Romania after the regime change in 1989. Its thematic chapters combine primarily the perspectives of political science and the sociology of ethnic relations and reflect the findings of a broad array of empirical investigations carried out in Transylvania, mainly within the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities·
Central to the topic of our volume is the so-called Romanian model of ethnic relations. This expression emerged around the turn of the millennium, being used extensively by the Romanian diplomacy in the context of Euro-Atlantic integration to highlight how ethnic coexistence in Romania has been relatively peaceful compared to other states of Southeastern Europe, thus providing an example for how ethnic tensions might be diffused (Nastasă and Salat 2000). Social scientists were also quite optimistic about the capacity of Romania’s young democracy to accommodate Hungarian minority claims (Csergő 2002, 2007; Mihailescu 2008; Saideman and Ayres 2008; Stroschein 2012). The main reasons for this optimism were that throughout most of the 1996–2012 period, the dominant ethnic party representing the Hungarian community participated in a number of coalition governments and that quasi-institutionalized bargaining mechanisms have taken shape between Romanian and Hungarian political actors. Some analysts even envisioned that Romania was moving toward some sort of consociational democracy (Mungiu-Pippidi 1999; Andreescu 2000; Brusis 2015). Other scholars were more cautious, arguing that the major elements of the Romanian way of conflict resolution have been based on political bargaining between minority and majority elites (Csergő 2007; Stroschein 2012), and have led to the cooptation of the Hungarians into executive power (Medianu 2002; Horváth 2002; Saideman and Ayres 2008) and a shift toward a more pluralistic approach in minority policies (Horváth and Scacco 2001; Ram 2003; Dobre 2003). This pluralistic shift has meant primarily the recognition of the organizations of the minorities (formed on the ethnic principle) as legitimate representatives of their communities (Bíró and Pallai 2011; Horváth 2013) and some important concessions in minority language use and education (Csergő 2007; Stroschein 2012; Horváth 2013).
Given these attributes, Romania was and is still often invoked as an example of successful conflict resolution and minority accommodation. However, we argue that such an assessment is rushed, and there is a dearth of literature that considers indeed realistically the actual working of the “Romanian model”.1 With this volume, we wish to contribute to fill this gap. Using an analysis of the most important processes affecting Transylvanian Hungarians, we aim to provide an assessment of the major features, functioning and consequences of the Romanian model of ethnic relations.
The book is structured in three parts and focuses on five broad and interlinked topics: (1) the Romanian regime of minority policies; (2) the political agency exercised by Transylvanian Hungarian elites; (3) the meso-level institutional structures sustaining ethnic parallelism; (4) the social and demographic consequences of the institutional and discursive order of ethnic relations in Romania; and (5) the strategies of boundary reinforcement employed by the Hungarian elites. Each of these topics implies a different level of analysis, and our objective is also to provide empirically grounded hypotheses concerning the interrelation between these levels, which could be tested in the future also in the case of other ethnic or national minorities.
This introductory chapter has three parts. In the first section, we present our basic assumptions and sketch our conceptual-theoretical framework, which are rooted in the traditions of historical institutionalism and social constructivism. The second section outlines the structure of the volume and highlights the most important arguments addressed in each chapter. We conclude by summarizing some basic information regarding Transylvania and its Hungarian community.
1 Conceptual Tools
The chapters of the volume combine multiple disciplinary perspectives, including demography, political and social history, the sociology of economics and religion, and legal studies, with a particular emphasis on political science and the sociology of ethnic relations. The conceptual frameworks used by the authors of each chapter also vary, but are rooted in two broad theoretical approaches: historical institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996; Thelen 1999; Pierson 2000; Gorenburg 2003; Stroschein 2012) and social constructivism and the boundary-making approach (Barth 1969; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Alba and Nee 2003; Alba 2005; Wimmer 2013; Lamont et al. 2016). Historical institutionalism is the primary analytical framework in the first two parts of the book (dedicated to political and institutional processes), while social constructivism plays a pivotal role especially in the third part (focusing on processes of ethnic classification and boundary maintenance). The volume is also united by six underlying assumptions that govern the analyses throughout the book. These are:
1. Institutional orders generally produce asymmetrical opportunities for the various actors involved in political processes. Historical institutionalists argue that contention and conflict between different groups play an important role in political processes. The outcome of these battles, however, is conditioned by the institutional order of the state, which is not a neutral broker of the relations between different societal actors. On the contrary, historical institutionalists view the state as an institutional complex that produces profound asymmetries between different actors (Hall and Taylor 1996). The focus on the nationalizing state in the study of ethnic politics (Brubaker 1996, 2011) is connected to this institutional perspective, well suited for investigating the power asymmetries immanent in the institutional structure.
2. Both formal and informal rules matter. Historical institutionalists define institutions as “formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity” (Hall and Taylor 1996, p. 398). The distinction between formal and informal institutions is crucial to assessing the Romanian minority policy regime. Drawing on the definition provided by Rechel (2009a), under the term minority policy regime we understand the totality of legal and informal rules governing ethnic relations and minority accommodation. While the majority of existing comparative research—especially studies comparing a large number of cases—focuses only on the legal framework of minority protection and minority policy (Rechel 2009b; Székely and Horváth 2014), we believe that informal rules are at least as important as formal ones and that in the “Romanian model of ethnic relations” the level of informality is rather high.2
3. Institutions shape the behavior of the political actors. As Hall and Taylor (1996) and Thelen (1999) emphasize, there are three distinguishable perspectives within the theories of “new institutionalism”: historical, sociological, and rational choice institutionalism. Historical and sociological institutionalisms rely on culturalist explanations of human agency , which argue that institutions shape the worldview of actors and, as frameworks of socialization, are conducive to certain habits and routines of problem solving. Rational choice institutionalism, on the other hand, perceives human behavior as instrumentally rational. According to this perspective, institutions play a pivotal role in the coordination of collective action by providing information concerning the behavior of other actors and by establishing mechanisms to enforce agreements and penalties for those who break the rules (Hall and Taylor 1996, p. 939). While some of the chapters of this volume rely on rational choice argumentation,3 we assume that the political agency of minority actors is not completely strategic. Institutions play a key role in historically conditioned processes of socialization and are conducive to certain habituses and self-perceptions. Additionally, the political agency of the Hungarian elites of Transylvania has a strong value-rational component (Csergő and Regelmann 2017; Varshney 2003), and minority institutions play a pivotal role in sustaining a collectivist ethic prevalent among Hungarian elites (Bárdi et al. 2014).
4. The concept of path dependence used by historical institutionalists plays a key role in our analysis. Pierson (2000) distinguished between a broader and a narrower definition of path dependence. In a broad sense, i...