Autonomy à la carte: The creative claiming tactics of the Hungarian minority in Romania

ABSTRACT

Through a detailed case-study of the Hungarian minority in Romania, this article better understands the non-secessionist, non-violent claims to autonomy of ethnic minorities and the discursive framework in which claims operate. Analysis of policy documents and elite interviews demonstrates how ‘autonomy’ claiming is not only conducted explicitly. Rather, it also occurs creatively through a discursive word-play technique utilized by different minority actors which substitutes ‘decentralization’, ‘regionalization’ and ‘self-governance’ for ‘autonomy’. However, to elites across political persuasions, and unlike differentiations in the scholarly literature, these terms mean the same thing. Moreover, different minority actors have a preferred discourse for claiming: ‘historic autonomists’ favour strong, explicit and symbolic claims while ‘modern autonomists’ support a strategic and creative claiming tactic. These findings of the creativity of autonomy claiming discourse can be extended to other ethnic minorities seeking institutional recognition via non-violent means.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomy
• ethnic minorities
• discourse
• Central Europe
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Which countries fall into this region is much debated. For my purposes, I am including the non-Soviet post-communist countries which have either joined the EU or are part of the former-Yugoslavia. They are: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo (although not fully recognized), Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia. The lack of territorial arrangements is with the exception of countries emerging from post-conflict Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia (Dembinska, Máracz, and Tonk 2014).

2 The biggest mass rally for autonomy was in March 2013, organized by SZNT (Sekler National Council, Székely Nemzeti Tanács). However, even the leader of the SZNT commented that it was elite led, that they had to take people to the streets. Since then, mass mobilization has not reached similar levels, and elite claims are the main avenue of autonomy claiming.

3 Note that the interviews allowed for the word-play to be uncovered, but that claims and the usage of the different terms occur in both Hungarian and Romanian.

4 See online appendix.

5 Others have written extensively on these autonomy claims and plans (Bakk 2004; Eplényi 2006; Bochsler and Szöcsik 2013b; Székely, 2014).

6 In addition to the political reactions detailed, from 2016 survey evidence, 14% of ethnic Romanians accepted granting territorial autonomy to Hungarians, only slightly higher than the 12% who answered affirmatively in 2014 (Kiss, Toró, and Székely 2018, 89).