2004/2005

Silvia Marton, Ph.D.

University of Bucharest

Born in 1976 in Targu-Mures, Romania
Studied European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and
Political Science at the University of Bucharest

Fellowship

Andrew W. Mellon-Fellow

Project

The Liberals, the State and the Nation: the Parliamentary Debates of 1866-1871 in Romania

The research attempts to analyze the constitution of a specific Romanian liberalism through the debates on the institutional building and consolidation of the Romanian nation-state during the parliamentary debates of 1866-71. The aim of the research is to identify major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation in order to highlight the solutions proposed by the liberals. The research aims at identifying a group of significant liberal representatives.
The research will try to answer the following questions: What kind of practice and what kind of liberal discourse influenced the political organization of the nation-state through the parliamentary debates? What were the major issues that preoccupied the nation? How did the Romanian nation try to define its identity? The research examines the aspects that define and explain the nation in its practical (political, economical, social) preoccupations in the context of modernization, in order to underline the historical and conjectural production of the nation-state and of a kind of liberalism.

Recommended Reading
Marton, Silvia. "Citizenship and Nation State: Is Their Coexistence Necessary?" Studia Politica. Romanian Political Science Review 1, 4 (2001): 1077-1089.
<br>-. "De la stat la natiune. Natiunea in dezbaterile parlamentare: 1866-1867." ["From the State to the Nation. The Nation in the Parliamentary Debates: 1866(1867."]
Studia Politica. Romanian Political Science Review 2, 2 (2002): 377-416.
<br>-. "La rhétorique diplomatique roumaine: risques et avantages, 1999-2002." In Politique et société dans la Roumanie contemporaine, edited by Alexandra Ionescu and
Odette Tomescu-Hatto, 287-306. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004 (Logiques politiques).

Colloquium, 28.04.2005

How does one become a Rumanian? A User's Guide. Citizenship amd Representation in the Parliamentary Debates of the mid-19th century

My research analyzes the debates on institution-building and the consolidation of the Romanian nation-state in the parliamentary debates of 1866-1871, in the light of some key concepts of political science. The overall objective is to identify major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation (with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals); to analyze the most important questions and arguments that constituted the political body; and to examine the laws that built the nation. The outcome of such an inquiry should tell us whether there was a specificity in the Romanian nation-building process, given that one can identify a sort of "standardization" of the processes of national identity building. This question is all the more relevant since the Romanian parliamentarians invoked numerous contemporary political models (such as "civilized Europe", "British representative government" etc.).

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' requests for naturalization, I wish to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen?

My argument is that the parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. The arguments of the parliamentarians allow us to build up a sort of "Manual of a Good Romanian". "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation.

In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, I wish, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, I hope that such an analysis will provide better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.