Suchergebnisse

The article shows the way in which the journal Conservatorul Constanţei illustrated the main subject of local political debate in 1909-1912: the issue of the political rights for the citizens of Dobrudja. This debate is significant as it unfolds in the same time as the consolidation of the local branch of the Conservative Party, as well as the participation of its representatives to the parliamentary elections in 1912. These are the first elections in which the citizens of Dobrudja take part, after they were reintegrated within the frontiers of the Romanian state (1878) and after they obtained political rights (1912).

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries 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? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The 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. "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, the article attempts, 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, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.