Keywords

1 Introduction

During the last two decades, kin-state engagement in Europe has been welcomed for its support in promoting the identity and language of kin-minority groups in their home-states. The trans-sovereign involvement of kin-states in the fate of their kin-minorities has primarily contributed to strengthening their identity and protecting and promoting their culture in the home-states. At the same time, many home-states have adopted policies that mainly attempt to address the inequalities between the majority and minority groups and which have advanced the recognition and accommodation of ethno-cultural minorities. In particular, policy measures intended to protect and promote the language and cultural heritage of ethno-cultural minority groups, to ensure their religious freedom and/or safeguard their land rights have contributed to the enhancement of their group autonomy. Overall, these developments have advanced and strengthened the concept of autonomy for minority groups in Europe.

This paper examines the nature and extent of autonomy for minority groups in the context of the Hungarian minority in Romania. It shows that, rather than being a mechanism through which states fulfil their obligation to protect a people’s fair opportunity for self-determination, at best, autonomy is only a vehicle through which minority rights are administered. According to the fifth national report that Romania submitted to the Council of Europe in 2019, ‘the situation of the rights of the persons belonging to national minorities has improved substantially from one monitoring cycle to another and Romania can be considered as an example of good European practices’ (Council of Europe, 2019, Introduction). However, a focus on the Hungarian minority highlights the extent to which the group’s autonomy is entrenched in a complex nexus of political and economic dependence involving both the home-state and the kin-state. I argue that the exercise of autonomy in cases such as the one discussed here is at odds with the legal and political developments concerning the concept of autonomy for minority groups in Europe. This has not only weakened autonomy’s normative foundations but also, more worryingly, made it evanescent.

2 The Conceptualisation of Autonomy for Minority Groups

Despite recent growing interest in the concept of autonomy for minority groups (Prina, 2020), not only is the right to autonomy still absent from international law but also autonomy for minority groups remains a contentious issue and continues to be rejected on the grounds that it threatens a state’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. This is particularly the case in central and eastern Europe where the majority’s right to self-determination remains historically anchored and originates in forms of cultural autonomy enjoyed under the Ottoman, Habsburg and Tsarist empires. However, international law continues to draw an artificial distinction between peoples and minorities: if peoples may enjoy a right to self-determination, the universal and equivalent obligation of states towards minorities is weaker and defined uniquely as a right to participate in cultural life with others (Gilbert, 2002). As such, autonomy has been viewed as a constructive approach to address the imbalance between majority and minority groups. In a seminal article published in 1999, Wright argues that autonomy represents a mechanism through which a right to self-determination can be extended to all people living within the territory of a state (Wright, 1999). However, the conceptualisation of autonomy remains normatively weak in the literature.

Historically, different forms of autonomy for minority groups have been permitted: from the millet system of the Ottoman Empire through to the experiments on national cultural autonomy during the Habsburg and Tsarist empires preceding the First World War and, later, in Estonia in the interwar period (Smith & Hiden, 2012). In the contemporary world, autonomy is used to label a capacity of a group for agency and is discussed in the context of territorial autonomy or power-sharing arrangements. The term is also employed in reference to forms of self-rule in different areas of public policy, often education or culture but also taxation, housing and/or health care. If autonomy is further understood as being synonymous with control over issues of concern to minorities that impact on their existence as a group (Wright, 1999), many scholars point out that conceptualising autonomy is further complicated by the different forms these arrangements take. The analytical distinction between territorial and non-territorial autonomy continues to dominate the literature. This is in spite of mounting empirical evidence that autonomy remains largely exercised on a territorial basis and predominantly in the areas of culture and education (Coakley, 2016). In his welcome attempt to conceptualise non-territorial autonomy, Salat poignantly notes that the nature and extent of autonomy are further determined by the context and justifications of implementing such arrangements, legitimacy and support, institutional particularities, levels of entrenchment and outcomes (Salat, 2015). To summarise, the understanding of autonomy for minority groups seems to be dominated by practice rather than norms and is profoundly marked by the absence of a right to autonomy for minority groups in international law and, more generally, of a broader normative discussion underpinning its conceptualisation.

Overall, all forms of autonomy involve a direct or indirect acknowledgement on the part of a home-state of the value of internal self-determination to protect ethnic diversity. If equal recognition of ethno-cultural and religious distinctiveness is a minimum requirement to fulfil the liberal ideals of toleration and equal citizenship (Patten, 2014), Marko stresses that the effective exercise of autonomy is dependent upon the participation of minority groups in the democratic process (Marko, 1997). Nootens highlights a current consensus in the literature that autonomy is consistent with and conducive to integration. She stresses the importance of the recognition of ethno-cultural differences as well as the need to ensure the political, economic and cultural participation of members of minority groups in the public sphere in order to enhance such conceptions of autonomy (Nootens, 2015). However, she adds that the recognition of national minorities as cultural-linguistic groups may also become a powerful tool for national states to limit the range of claims such groups can make against the different ways in which the hegemony of a majority group may be exercised (i.e. dominance may manifest itself not only in the area of culture but also in economic and political spheres) (Nootens, 2015). Moreover, Prina notes that, in effect, many autonomy arrangements have disempowered minority groups (Prina, 2020) or have the potential to do so, as demonstrated by the case discussed here of the Hungarian minority in Romania.

Distinctively, rather than strengthening groups’ freedom from domination, the demand for or the institutionalisation of autonomy for minority groups under many arrangements suggests a conceptualisation of freedom at odds with liberal and republican traditions. In Europe, the accommodation of national minorities has maintained and strengthened the interference of the home-state. A positive approach to accommodation has been seen as one in which minority ethno-cultural identities and cultures are positively recognised and promoted by the state. According to Article 5 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities ‘the Parties [the member states] undertake to promote the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage’ (Council of Europe, 1995). However, as anticipated by Pettit (1996), conceptions of freedom which endorse state interference may create relationships of dependency, social hierarchies and/or enhance the use of arbitrary power. The case of the Hungarian minority is illustrative in this respect. In the following sections, I show that the autonomy of the Hungarian minority in Romania has become embedded in the power structure and that its exercise is increasingly dependent upon kin-state funding. I further argue that this complex nexus of economic and political dependence on both the home-state and the kin-state makes it increasingly difficult to argue that the autonomy of the group is consistent with an obligation to protect a fair opportunity for self-determination.

3 Cultural Autonomy in Romania: A Dream That Hasn’t Come True

Ethnic Hungarians continue to be the largest national minority in Romania, totalling 1,227,600 in the 2011 census (National Institute of Statistics of Romania, 2011). In the first two decades after the Second World War, Romania treated its Hungarian minority generously. Stalin returned northern Transylvania to Romania on the condition that it granted the members of cultural minority groups the same privileges as those enjoyed by the majority, as well as linguistic and cultural rights (King, 1973, pp. 146–169). As early as 1945, the Groza government responded to the demands of the Hungarian National Democratic Union by implementing a series of policies in relation to the use of and education in the Hungarian language, the creation of a Hungarian university and the establishment of an autonomous Hungarian administrative region in north-east Transylvania (King, 1973, pp. 147–152; Rothschild & Wingfield, 2000, pp. 106–113). The Hungarian Autonomous Region was established by the 1952 Constitution and, although its boundaries were modified in 1960,Footnote 1 it remained in existence until 1968 (King, 1973, pp. 146–169).

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the rise of socialist nationalism in the mid-1960s represented a turning point in the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Romania. Gradually, the Romanian government started to pursue policies aimed at assimilating the Hungarian minority: Hungarian language schools became bilingual, the Hungarian University of Cluj was merged with the Romanian one and the process culminated with the administrative reorganisation of 1968 which put an end to the Hungarian Autonomous Region and split it into three counties (King, 1973, pp. 146–169). However, following the Prague Spring of 1968, conditions for cultural minorities improved. Over the couple of years that followed, the Romanian government allowed the publication of books, newspapers and periodicals in minority languages and improved educational conditions for minority groups (King, 1973, pp. 146–169). The situation dramatically changed in the early 1970s when Ceauşescu became president of Romania. In the two decades preceding the fall of communism, the communist government pursued an aggressive policy of forced assimilation: public education in the Hungarian language was limited; the access of members of the Hungarian minority to certain jobs was restricted or entirely blocked; and a process of ethnic homogenisation of Hungarian towns in Transylvania and one of systematisation, which relocated the Hungarian peasantry to industrial towns across Romania, were simultaneously carried out between 1972 and 1989 (Bell, 1996; Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, 2006, p. 528).

The status and rights of national minorities, particularly the Hungarian minority, have, on the whole, remained contentious issues in Romania since 1989. In fact, nationalism, understood as the majority’s attempt to maintain and strengthen its political, cultural and economic dominance, was still the driving ideology in the initial years after the fall of communism. Although one of the first measures taken by the Romanian authorities at that time was to ensure a constitutional right to parliamentary representation for all national minorities,Footnote 2 the Law on Public Administration, adopted in 1991, established Romanian as the only language to be used in official settings (Csergő, 2007). Moreover, the Law on Education, implemented in 1995, imposed additional restrictions on education in minority languages to those that had been in place since 1986 (Csergő, 2007). The situation improved for the Hungarian minority group after the elections of 1996 when the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) joined the governing coalition. Since then, provisions targeting cultural minorities, which refer to the use of and education in their mother tongues and their representation in parliament and local administration, although scattered in Romanian law, have strengthened the recognition of national minorities in Romania. Without doubt, the most significant achievement during this period was the amended Law on Local Public Administration of 2001, which grants cultural minorities the right to use their languages in public matters if the number of individuals belonging to a minority group passes the threshold of 20% of the community’s population.

The notion of cultural autonomy was introduced for the first time in the Romanian legal system through the Draft Law on the Status of National Minorities, which was drawn up by the UDMR in 2005, two years before Romania became an EU member-state. Intended to replace Law no. 86 on the Status of National Minorities, it has remained on the table in the Romanian parliament since 2005. Rejected by the Senate at that time, in 2012 it was brought back to parliament for further discussion, at the end of which it was resubmitted to the Parliamentary Committee of Human Rights, Denominations and National Minorities for further amendments. More recently, the UDMR failed in its attempt to bring the draft law back to the 2019 parliamentary agenda (Statutul minorităţilor naţionale, 2019). Decker argues that the main drawback of the draft law remains its incompatibility with the Romanian legal context (Decker, 2007), which has not been addressed since the law’s inception in 2005.

The draft law represents a turning point for prospective improvements in the accommodation of national minorities in Romania. It lays down a series of collective and individual cultural rights, which, on the one hand, refer to cultural reproduction and cultural autonomy and, on the other hand, establish and define the powers of institutions and organisations protecting and promoting the culture of minorities. Although the beneficiaries of the law appear to be minority communities, several of its provisions set out amendments to the current legislation to establish a commitment to equal respect of Romanian citizens as members of national minority groups and to equal recognition of their cultural identity and differences. The draft law includes the prohibition of any form of discrimination based on language, culture or religion and proposes increasing the cultural autonomy of national minorities.

Article 57 of the draft law defines cultural autonomy as ‘the capacity of a national minority to exercise decision-making powers regarding issues pertaining to its cultural, linguistic and religious identity through councils selected by its own members’. Article 58 further specifies the areas in which cultural autonomy applies, namely education in minority languages, media, cultural heritage and the management of financial support received from the state.

Despite a lengthy critique of the draft law, the Council of Europe notes, in its Opinion from 2005, that the introduction of cultural autonomy is viewed as a positive step in the direction of strengthening the participation of national minorities (Council of Europe, 2005). It further states that ‘the form of cultural autonomy contained in the draft law would ensure real decision-making powers to the representatives of national minorities mainly through their binding consent, and not just consultation rights as is the case in some other countries’ (Council of Europe, 2005, para. 59). While the Council of Europe praises the novelty and revolutionary character of this legislation, it points to a number of uncertainties contained in the draft—in particular, the envisaged institutionalisation of cultural autonomy that may weaken its exercise (Council of Europe, 2005). It also highlights that the draft law does not clearly delineate the new competences of cultural autonomy from those of existing institutions, such as various state authorities, the Parliamentary Committee of Human Rights, Denominations and National Minorities, the Council of National Minorities and organisations for citizens belonging to national minorities (Council of Europe, 2005, paras. 66–73).

It is important to note that some scholars have remarked that central and eastern European states, including Romania, often chose to pursue such policies not as a matter of justice but primarily because they viewed them as being beneficial in their efforts to qualify for EU membership (Tesser, 2003). However, the main developments regarding the accommodation of ethno-cultural diversity in Romania remain situated at the intersection of the domestic government’s interests and external conditionality (Cârstocea, 2011; Decker, 2007; Kiss et al., 2018). Overall, since 1996, external pressures and domestic political bargaining have overwhelmingly defined the nature and extent of Romania’s minority accommodation policies, while broader considerations of justice have been secondary, at best. With few steps taken to improve the accommodation of minority groups after Romania became an EU member-state, the institutionalisation of minority rights in Romania remains incomplete, volatile and politicised.

4 The Hungarian Minority and the Nexus of Dependence

The strengthening and preservation of the autonomy of the Hungarian minority have become increasingly dependent on the financial support received partly from the home-state, but mostly from the kin-state. While Romania’s direct funding of its minority cultures has remained modest, Hungary’s support of its kin minority in Romania has diversified in nature and significantly increased over the last decade.

4.1 Romania’s Funding of Minority Cultures

The Romanian state financially supports only those national minority groups represented in the Romanian Parliament. As noted above, the right to parliamentary representation of all national minority groups has been constitutionally safeguarded since 1991. Article 59 of the 1991 Romanian Constitution, now Article 62 of the amended 2017 Constitution, guarantees the political representation of national minorities, stating that ‘organisations of citizens belonging to national minorities, which fail to obtain the number of votes for representation in parliament, have the right to one deputy seat each, under the terms of the electoral law’. However, financial support is allocated and managed through the Council of National Minorities, broadly defined as one of the consultative bodies of the Romanian government. Initially set up in 1993 to bring together all organisations representing national minorities (Romanian Government, 1993, Art. 1), in 2001 representation on the Council was reserved exclusively for those organisations that obtained a seat in parliament (Romanian Government, 2001, Art. 2). According to the updated regulations, each minority, regardless of its size or socio-economic characteristics, was allowed to send only three representatives to the Council (Romanian Government, 2001, Art. 2).

The total budgetary allocations for national minorities on the Council have gradually increased from 90,000,000 lei (circa £20,000,000) in 2001 to 172,056,000 lei (circa £30,000,000) in 2021 (Romanian Government, 2021). Each organisation receives an amount determined largely by the size of the minority group it represents, the cultural and educational activities it plans to undertake that year, its specific social-economic characteristics and its level of influence on the Council (Cârstocea, 2011). The Hungarian minority, now represented by the UDMR,Footnote 3 is the largest minority group in Romania, totalling 63% of people belonging to national minorities, and receives the largest percentage of the allocation (circa 19%), followed by the Roma (14%) and German (8%) minorities.

In its recent report to the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Romania acknowledges that it continues to provide financial support to all national minority organisations represented on the Council of National Minorities and recognises the need to provide further funding (Council of Europe, 2019). A symbolic increase in funding followed in 2021. Interestingly, however, the report notes that the money allocated to national minorities has been spent mainly on the purchase, construction or refurbishment of workplaces, equipment and salaries rather than on the protection and promotion of the minorities’ identity and culture (Council of Europe, 2019).

4.2 The Role of the Kin-State

The engagement of the kin-state, which started in 2001, has gradually modified the nature of the accommodation and the living conditions of the Hungarian minority. By the mid-1990s, Hungary had signed bilateral agreements with both Romania and Slovakia, which ultimately aimed to strengthen the protection of the Hungarian minorities in the two states and their commitments to achieve fair accommodation of their minority groups. However, the almost unanimous vote in favour of the adoption of Act LXII on Hungarians Living in Neighbouring Countries in 2001 reflected a general disappointment in the Hungarian parliament that the bilateral agreements had failed to improve the conditions of the Hungarian minority groups in those states to the point in which both Slovakia and Romania would have recognised them as partner nations to the respective titular majorities in each state (Bárdi, 2004).

Act LXII on Hungarians Living in Neighbouring Countries stipulated that a kin-state’s duties included the identity and recognition of and support for Hungarian culture abroad. Following amendments to the Act in 2003, its intended beneficiaries became almost 3 million people who are not Hungarian citizens and who reside in Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now the Republic of Serbia), Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Ukraine (Hungarian Government, 2004). The obligations to support Hungarian culture abroad have a dual nature: on its own territory, the Hungarian state facilitates the equal access of its ethnic kin to education and culture while, beyond its borders, it promotes Hungarian culture and education within the kin-minorities’ home-states. The extent of Hungary’s trans-sovereign engagement is expressed in Articles 13, 14 and 18 (Hungarian Government, 2004). According to Article 13, the Hungarian state facilitates the establishment, functioning and development of departments in neighbouring states affiliated to accredited Hungarian institutions of higher education, as well as institutions of higher education using Hungarian as the language of instruction (Hungarian Government, 2004). Furthermore, Article 14 states that minors pursuing their studies in the Hungarian language or culture are entitled to grants and support to purchase books and learning materials (Hungarian Government, 2004). Lastly, according to Article 18, the organisations operating in neighbouring countries to preserve the Hungarian identity, mother tongue and culture are entitled to financial support from the Hungarian state (Hungarian Government, 2004).

A turning point in Hungary’s engagement with its kin-minority groups is Act XLIV on Hungarian Nationality which took effect on 1 January 2011. The Act facilitates access to extraterritorial citizenship for those of Hungarian heritage whose residence in another state is either voluntary (i.e. emigrants of Hungarian heritage) or non-voluntary (i.e. members of kin-minority groups in neighbouring states) (Kovács, 2010). Increasing the number of new citizens through facilitating access to extraterritorial citizenship has dominated Hungary’s kin-state politics in recent years. By December 2017, 1,000,000 people of Hungarian heritage living abroad had been naturalised as Hungarian citizens (Fidesz: National unity, 2017).

In parallel, Hungary has also targeted some initiatives at ethnic Hungarians from neighbouring states. Over the last few years, the Hungarian minority in Romania has become the main beneficiary of Hungary’s kin-state policy. Figure 1 shows the evolution of funding targeting Hungary’s kin-minorities between 1990 and 2015.

Fig. 1
A line and bar chart illustrates how funding for kin-minorities has changed over time. The x axis has an interval of 50 values from 0 to 300, and the y axis has years from 1990 to 2017. It reaches its highest point of 275 between 2015 and 2016.

The evolution of funding for kin-minorities between 1990 and 2015 (in million USD) (Kiss et al., 2018, p. 134)

Full size image

Since early 2018 the Hungarian minority in Romania has directly benefited from two new government-funded initiatives, namely the Hungarian Government Ordinance 2061/2017 on the assistance offered to organisations abroad and the Hungarian Government Ordinance 2074/2017 on providing the necessary resources for and ensuring financial assistance to programmes in Transylvania. Since 2017, economic cooperation has become a priority of the Orbán government (Kántor, 2019, 2022). In 2021, the Hungarian government created a new platform for investment in agriculture in neighbouring states (Ungaria pregătește, 2021). Criticism by the Slovak government appears to have slowed some of the planned investments in Slovakia (Hudec & Makszimov, 2021). However, despite the Romanian government’s initial position against such economic programmes in 2019 (Guvernul Ungariei, 2020), they continue unabated in Romania.

The main instrument for the distribution of funding to neighbouring countries has been the Bethlen Gábor Fund (Hudec & Makszimov, 2021; Kántor, 2019). Initial data show that the amount of money the Hungarian government has allocated to kin-minorities has increased substantially since 2017 and has more than doubled between 2020 and 2022.Footnote 4 Moreover, according to Hudec and Makszimov (2021), in 2020, Hungary spent HUF 128 billion (circa £332,800,000), triple the amount allocated at the start of the year and which was directed at a diversity of actors and institutions. Previous investigations in Croatia and Slovakia reveal that this money was received by churches, cultural organisations, media outlets, sports teams and organisations linked to politicians of Hungarian ethnicity (Hudec & Makszimov, 2021; ‘Money flows freely’, 2018; Oroszi, 2018).

To conclude, Hungarian government policies in the last decade have not only strengthened ethnic identity and the ties between ethnic Hungarians and the current ruling party Fidesz but have also increased their dependence on the kin-state. In a recent article, Balogh poignantly notes: ‘The Transylvanians received not only money from the Hungarian state but also citizenship and voting rights /…/ The Transylvanians will not be impressed by him [Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition candidate to Viktor Orbán] or anyone else from outside of Fidesz’ (Balogh, 2021). However, experts in Hungary’s kin-state policies are warning that the targeted kin-minorities are becoming very vulnerable to changes in the funding policy, noting that long-term financial sustainability has become the most pressing issue (Gazsó, 2022; Salat, 2022).

5 Conclusion

While the recognition and accommodation of national minorities in Romania has gradually improved, considerations of justice have been and remain secondary, at best. Indeed, as illustrated here, the accommodation of national minorities, and predominantly the Hungarian minority, has become increasingly disconnected from such considerations. The engagement of the kin-state, which started in 2001, has slowly modified the nature of the accommodation and the living conditions of the Hungarian minority. However, at the same time, the autonomy of the Hungarian minority has become entrenched in a complex nexus of political and economic dependence, involving both the home-state and the kin-state. I argue that the exercise of autonomy in cases such as the one presented here is at odds with the legal and political developments concerning the concept of autonomy for minority groups in Europe.

Distanced from considerations of justice, the institutionalisation and practice of autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Romania has not only weakened its normative foundations but, more worryingly, made it evanescent. Moreover, in the current geopolitical and economic context and with the appropriation of Hungary to Russia, the pivotal role of the kin-state in ensuring the autonomy and welfare of the Hungarian minority in Romania is now emerging as a threat rather than a guarantee of future wellbeing.