Governing the “Unmarked” Citizens: Romania’s Roma in the Grip of Socialist Technologies of Power

Abstract

While many scholarly contributions have documented the socialist state policies deployed toward the Roma from Central and Eastern Europe, less attention was paid to how discourses and policies have aimed to turn the “non-European,” “backward Roma” into reformed and modernized subjects that were supposed to conform to an “European,” sedentary way of life. Thus, I discuss proletarization and sedentarization not as state policies but as programs and technologies of power, specific to a socialist governmentality. The article interrogates the programs, technologies of power and biopolitical regulations that allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, with profound depoliticizing effects. I analyze political programs, governmental reports on Roma and ministry regulations as instruments of governmentality through which the governance of the “Roma question” took shape. Special attention is given to data/knowledge production. Finally, the research pinpoints that the micro-scale and the everyday workings of the socialist technologies of power might explain the different trajectories of socio-economic adaptation among Roma groups, which some studies have revealed during post-socialism.

Introduction

Recent research on Roma in Europe has documented their continuous socio-economic and spatial marginality in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as well as in Western Europe, with rising inequalities, abject poverty and residential and educational segregation affecting many Roma families on both sides of the continent. Their socio-economic, spatial, and political exclusions are hard to grasp because, after 1989, various national and European programs were devised and implemented in order to improve their socio-economic well-being. In explaining the deep-rooted socio-economic and symbolic exclusion of the heterogeneous groups that are today brought together under the umbrella term “Roma,” some scholars have focused on a historical perspective in understanding the stigmatization and marginalization processes that have historically harmed Roma communities (van Baar 2011; Taylor 2014; Powell and Lever 2015). For Powell and Lever, much of the recent scholarly and policy-oriented work on Roma is anchored in a present-centered and ahistorical framework, without taking into consideration that “their often marginal position cannot be explained without taking the historical repressive policies into account, which heavily contributed to a construction of an ethnically defined minority” (2015, 3). While much historical research has documented such repressive policies against the Roma implemented by imperial authorities or nation-states, less research has explored how discourses and policies have aimed to turn the “non-European,” “backward Roma” into reformed and modernized subjects that were supposed to follow an “European” and modern way of life.

The socialist authorities that came into power in CEE in the aftermath of World War II had the fundamental goal to assimilate the Roma and to transform them into productive and cooperative socialist citizens because their “deviant” lifestyle was incompatible with the construction of the new society. While the fundamental goal was the same, the type of policies pursued and their enforcement differed within the Soviet bloc. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were strong enforcers of coercive policies devised for the Roma while Yugoslavia, a multiethnic state, had the most supportive policies toward Roma integration. Between the two trends, Romania and Poland, although they devised the same type of policies as the first two, was a weaker enforcer, which determined Zoltan Barany to label their efforts as “erratic intrusion” (Barany 2000, 2002). However, as I will show in the article, Romania was more proactive in handling its “Roma problem,” due to its historical aversion against nomadism.

For most Roma in CEE, proletarization and sedentarization were the two main processes through which the goal of assimilation was to be achieved. Socialist states from CEE labeled these policies as prerequisites toward modernization of a backward, deviant, and unruly social group. The article argues against scholars that have situated the measures devised for the Roma as public policies enforced by the CEE governments and not as targeted ethnic policies, by discussing one particular case, that of Roma in Romania.

By problematizing the case of Roma from Romania, I argue that instead of discussing proletarization and sedentarization as state policies, we should analyze them as technologies of power and programs, in a Foucauldian sense, specific to a socialist governmentality. Despite the fact that during state-socialism, the power structures were more concentrated at the central level, a governmentality perspective unveils how power processes are rather decentered, allowing one to analyze their micro-social and everyday workings. Thus, instead of assuming a top-down implementation of sedentarization and proletarization by a centralized power structure, embedded in the ruling structures of the Communist Party, the article argues for a micro-social analysis of the two processes, their negotiated and ambiguous implementation and the acts of resistance and counter-conducts by some Roma groups. Taken together, these could explain the different socio-economic trajectories of heterogenous Roma groups in Romania.

In the late 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term governmentality which can be defined as “a mode of [diffuse] power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population” (Butler 2004, 52). Governmentality reveals how governmental practices—programs and techniques through which individuals or groups are governed—are linked to political rationalities. The latter are discursive fields in which the problems to be governed are exposed, defined and for which solutions are proposed (Foucault 1997). Governmental power operates through heterogeneous technologies of power and programs. While programs define forms of knowledge and discourses about the social process or individuals to be governed, technologies of power are “techniques and practices for the disciplining, surveillance, administration and shaping of human individuals” (Gledhill 2000, 150). As I will show in the next sections, the socialist authorities subjected the Roma to heterogeneous programs and technologies of power, whose goals were to transform the Roma into productive and disciplined socialist citizens. Sedentarization (forced settlement) was the main technology of power devised for the nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, while proletarization was the main technology of power for the already forcedly settled and assimilated Roma. The main focus of the article will be how the Roma from Romania came into the grip of socialist technologies of power, but passing references to other CEE countries are also made.

The article is divided into five sections. In the first section, I discuss the possibility of a socialist governmentality. While the socialist political project was not primarily focused on the protection of the nation state against the (racially) external or internal Other but rather on the transformation of society, which had at its center the formation of the “new Soviet man,” biopolitical regulations that targeted especially the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma were deployed at the dawn of the socialist takeover. In the second section, a brief introduction to Roma’s place in the Romanian socialist ethno-political landscape is offered. The Roma did not fulfill the criteria for being recognized as a national minority and were rather considered a socio-economic category that needed to be reformed to follow a socialist way of life. The third part reveals proletarization and sedentarization (forced settlement) as technologies of power and programs devised to transform the Roma into productive and good proletarians by highlighting at the same time the knowledge, political rationalities and the expertise that underpinned the two technologies of power. The fourth part discusses the specific mechanism of knowledge production as a tool that allowed the socialist authorities to devise biopower and biopolitical regulations through which the life of the Roma could be enhanced, optimized, and fostered. The problematization of the “Roma question” in social rather than ethnic or cultural terms allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily life of the Roma, depoliticizing the discriminatory practices associated with these interventions. For sections three and four I use secondary data and official documents issued by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, the main vector of political change, and by the (local branches of the) Romanian Secret Police, the “Securitate.” I use here the excellent work of Manuela Marin (2015a, 2015b) who has digitalized most of the archival documents that the two above institutions have issued between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, regarding the “Roma question.” In the final section it is argued that the everyday workings of the socialist technologies of power and programs might explain the different trajectories of socio-economic adaptation among the Roma, which many studies have revealed during post-socialism.

Was There a Socialist Governmentality?

In an oft-quoted lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1978-1979, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” which was less on biopolitics per se and more on the birth of (neo)liberalism, Foucault (2008, 99-100) was doubtful regarding the existence of a “socialist governmental rationality” or governmentality. He argued that socialism has rather incorporated liberal modalities of power without developing its own form of government. In his previous lecture from 1975-1976, “Society must be defended,” Foucault (1997) suggested that the socialist state could be analyzed as a biopolitical state. The French scholar implied that the biopolitical and biopower practices of the capitalist state were never contested by the socialist state but rather they were “taken up, developed, reimplanted, and modified […] in certain respects” (1997, 261). The socialist state has also imported the racist premises of the biopolitical modalities of power but managed to redeploy them not into an ethnic racism but a “racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism” (Foucault 1997, 261), which was widely present when dealing with Roma groups in CEE. At the same time, in the realm of the economic discourse, the socialist state has managed to transform the historical discourse of race war into a revolutionary discourse of class struggles. Once it was inscribed in the official state discourse, the revolutionary discourse could eliminate class enemies as though they were racial enemies (cf. Foucault 1997). Although they were not part of the traditional enemies of the state, the bourgeoisie or the nobility, the Roma (especially the nomadic and semi-nomadic) were considered part of the lumpenproletariat, a “dangerous class” (Bussard 1987) without a clear class-consciousness or a progressive role in history.

In order to “turn this poor and marginalized minority into good socialist citizens” (Stewart 1997, 6), the socialist authorities in the region have subjected the Roma to technologies of power and techniques of government that would work on the individual body in order to increase their productivity and discipline and subject them to state power rather than community or traditional leaders (pastoral power). The proletarization and sedentarization of Roma were the two main technologies of power that would discipline the Roma to act like good socialist citizens and proletarians. As I will show in the following sections, these technologies of power and programs deployed by the socialist state were embedded in forms of knowledge that were meant to expose the backwardness of Roma, thus legitimizing the modernization-cum-assimilation programs devised by the socialist powerholders.

Much of Foucault’s conceptual instruments and work on governmentality have been applied in the context of Western democratic societies and in (neo)liberal regimes of power (Rose and Miller 1992; Rose 1996, 1999; Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996; Lemke 2019), while less scholarly work was done on grasping its application in illiberal societies, which adopted an “authoritarian governmentality” (Dean 2010, 155-174). In particular, a socialist governmentality was considered less applicable in the space of the CEE countries because the governmental power targeted less the population but rather the means of production and the regulation of the economy by “administering things, regulating the process of production, [and] mobilizing the material domain” (Valiavicharska 2010, 3). On the other hand, Prozorov (2017, 100) argues that the object of socialist biopolitics was not “life as it was but life as it must become.” As alluded to above, the socialist revolution was not in its foremost focused on the protection of the nation state against the (racially) external or internal Other but rather on the transformation of society, which had at its center the blurring of distinctions between the self and the other, by targeting “the given self in the name of the Otherness that it must become” (Prozorov 2017, 100), which was the formation of the “new Soviet man.” Thus, the socialist biopolitics was focused on the transformation of life rather than on its protection, an argument which was also embraced by Valiavicharska (2010) in her depiction of the socialist modes of governance.

While power in non-liberal societies may be exercised more through its disciplinary and biopower mechanisms rather than through techniques of self-government more applicable to (neo)liberal forms of rule, the governmentality analytic framework is suitable to the study of the state-socialist system. For example, Sigley (2006, 491) refers to “socialist arts of government” which “governs not through familiar tactics of ‘freedom and liberty,’ but through a distinct planning and administrative rationality.” Therefore, a socialist government “claims that, not only is it possible to know in detail the object to be governed, but, furthermore, it is possible to predict the precise outcome of any possible intervention” (Sigley 1996, 473).

In his reflections on authoritarian or non-liberal forms of governmentality, Dean (2010) pinpoints that the socialist government did take up the task of exercising biopower, “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1978, 137). Biopower is a normalizing power, whose goal is to reinforce the social system against “abnormal” or potentially dangerous individuals, e.g., the mentally ill, political adversaries, or in this case, the (semi)nomadic and unruly Roma. In order to grasp how the socialist governmentality was deployed toward the Roma, we need to understand the political rationalities, the discursive fields in which the problems to be governed emerged, were defined and for which solutions were proposed, and the technologies of power and programs that helped materialize the political rationalities. Thus, political programs, reports on Roma, expert commissions, ministry regulations were instruments of governmentality through which the governance of the “Roma question” took shape. The technologies of government and programs deployed toward the Roma will be discussed further in the article, after a short description of the Roma’s place in the Romanian socialist ethno-political landscape.

The peculiar conditions of the Roma in Romania call for their specific treatment, as I endeavor to do in this article. While the majority of East European Roma were long sedentary by the beginning of the communist rule, particularly in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia, Romania still had a considerable share of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma (around 30%) who posed “security” problems to the socialist state (Barany 2002). Second, since the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, the formation of the nation-states and the emergence of industrial production, the Roma groups were framed as not yet being part of the formal economy. They were less integrated into the formal industrializing economy, while their lack of access to land made their incorporation into agricultural state cooperatives rather unlikely (Chelcea 1944).

The Roma in the Romanian Socialist Ethno-Political Landscape

The first census taken by the Romanian socialist authorities in 1948 did not register ethnicity but only native language. The census registered almost 15.9 million inhabitants, of which 13.6 million Romanian speakers, which meant 85.6% of the total population. The Hungarian-speaking population numbered almost 1.5 million (9.4%) and the German-speaking population almost 344 thousand (2.2%). Only 53.425 people registered Romani as their native language (0.3% of the population), which was slightly over half the number registered at the previous census in 1930 (Golopenția and Georgescu 1948). Although Romania lost territories during this period, the decrease was also due to the linguistic assimilation of many Roma as a route of socio-economic mobility.

The socialist elites continued the policy of ethnic homogenization that was set off during the WWII population exchange programs by allowing many Jewish and German ethnics to out-migrate (Boia 2015). According to the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) ruling elite, the issue of national minorities would be solved because the Romanian Constitution gave rights to “cohabiting minorities” (naționalități conlocuitoare in Romanian) equal to those of the majority population. While the other 13 ethnic minorities that lived on the territory of Romania could be recognized as cohabiting minorities and granted some cultural and political rights, the Roma minority had a particular place in the ethno-political landscape. As most of the CEE states that came under the Soviet tutelage, Romania adopted the Marxist-Leninist model for dealing with national minorities (Klimova-Alexander 2006). The criteria for fulfilling the status of national minority were those of common language, territory, history and a uniform culture, criteria that the Roma did not meet. Hence, they were not recognized as a national minority but rather as a socio-economic category that needed to be reformed, enhanced and incorporated into the socialist production system in order to follow a socialist way of life. In one of his main reflections on the “national question,” Stalin remarked (1953, 303. 307, 308):

A nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people. […]. A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. […] It is only when all these characteristics are present together that we have a nation.

Some Roma leaders tried to re-organize immediately after 1948 under the inter-war umbrella organization General Union of Roma in Romania (GURR) with the goal to obtain the status of national minority, but their claims were rejected by the socialist nomenklatura. Afterward, they have tried to set up a new proletarian-based party, the Roma People’s Union in Romania, but even this request was rejected by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the grounds that the organization’s structure no longer corresponded to that of the new “democratic committees” (Achim 2010).

With the regime change in the late 1940s, the sedentarization of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma became part of the “civilizing” plans of the socialist authorities, which aimed to “materially and spiritually raise” those parts of the population (national minorities or certain social categories) that were socially, culturally, and politically disenfranchised during the old capitalist regime.

In an early assessment done by the RWP in 1949, the “Roma question” was primarily a “social problem” for which educational, health and social assistance measures needed to be devised in order to properly subject the Roma to the discipline of the socialist economic system (Achim 2010). The assimilated Roma did not pose a special concern for the socialist authorities, which were more preoccupied (in the beginning) with the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma.

The Gypsies who are employed, who speak the language of the population with whom they live, who send their children to schools, who therefore go through a process of assimilation, are of a concern only insofar as their cultural level should be raised. […] The most acute problem of the Gypsy population in our country is that of the nomadic Gypsies, who move from place to place, staying only a few days in a locality; they live a primitive life, [spending] all the time in carts and tents, they are not registered at the local administrative bodies, they are not included in censuses, they are not recruited in the army, they do not pay taxes; they are 100% illiterate; they are still exploited by bulibași and vătafi [Roma traditional leaders], remnants of the tribal organization. (Romanian Workers’ Party 1949, 9, Council of Ministers – State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952a).

Unlike the more assimilated and Romanianized Roma, who were more prone to comply with the regulations of the state, nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma were “unmarked citizens,” who simply escaped the gaze of the nation-state, which could not impose its taxation and control functions upon them (Scott 1999). As another official document from 1949 issued by the RWP stated: “The nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma don’t fulfill their military service, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get married at the registry office, they don’t have an ID or patronyms [family name] […]. By changing their names, they try to confuse the authorities so that they cannot be tracked down” (Romanian Workers’ Party 1949). In other words, the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma were not yet modern citizens recognized by the (socialist) nation-state.

Their sedentarization and incorporation into the socialist production system was considered to be hampered by the traditional Roma leaders, wealthy landowners (moșieri and chiaburi, in Romanian), and other “reactionary forces” that sought to exploit their cheap labor for their own benefit. In the first documents issued by the Romanian socialist authorities in the early 1950s, the cause of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma was framed in the revolutionary discourse of class struggles. The governmental reports issued in the early 1950s revealed that not only the landowners but also Roma traditional leaders and other members of the Roma groups exploit the cheap labor force of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma:

The landowners try to hamper the integration of the nomads in productive work, to prevent their sedentarization, in order to be able to exploit them at will. […] The work is performed by the members of the group, and the money is collected by the bulibașa and distributed to the members of the group by his own will. [Moreover] There are also exploitative elements among the Gypsy population, pawnbrokers, speculators, horse traders, landowners, and remnants of the bourgeoisie. Many nomad hamlets are under the leadership of exploiting (Gypsy) chiefs and pawnbrokers. The chiefs still collect a kind of tribute from the hamlets under their subordination. (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952a)

While their labor force was exploited by the Roma traditional leaders and “remnants” of the bourgeoisie, their life conditions were plagued by poor living conditions, immiseration, poverty-related diseases, malnutrition, tuberculosis, pellagra, syphilis, and a high infant mortality rate (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952a). The depictions provided by the document reveal a striking resemblance to the ways in which Engels portrayed the lives of the working class in mid-nineteenth century England (Engels 1987). For the sedentarization of the Roma, the socialist authorities devised a modernization-cum-assimilation program which included the prohibition of movement on the territory of the country “for carts without registered licenses,” the allocation of housing or plots of land for the Roma to build (with the help of the state) their own housing, their incorporation into a stable form of employment, the enrollment of adults in literacy courses and children in the state education system and the provision of health education (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b, 1952a).

For scholars such as Viorel Achim (2010), Cătălin and Elena Zamfir (1993), and Zoltan Barany (2002), the measures targeting the (nomadic and semi-nomadic) Roma were part of the mainstream public policies enforced by the Romanian government and not targeted ethnic policies. I will critically engage with this scholarship and argue that Romania’s Roma were subjected to specific technologies of power and programs which allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, with profound depoliticizing effects. I will discuss in the next section two of these technologies of power, sedentarization, and proletarization.

Sedentarization and Proletarization as Technologies of Government

The Romanian socialist authorities were active in addressing the “Roma question” as soon as they came into power. Romania was one of the first states in CEE to endorse a policy of sedentarization toward its nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma at the end of the 1940s. Despite the fact that the latter category represented only one-third of the total Roma population (Marushiakova and Popov 2008), it was a constant concern for Romania’s administrative authorities because of security and public order threats (Achim 2010). The Central Committee of the RWP considered the semi-nomadic and nomadic Roma to be the most pressing issue, all the more as the construction of a “multilaterally developed socialist society” was incompatible with the persistence of phenomena of “social backwardness,” such as nomadism, extreme poverty, or the fact that a part of the population remained outside the political and social framework of the state (Marin 2015a). This is why the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie strictly regulated the movement of the nomadic Roma and forbade them to beg, practice fortune telling, or trade.

For the Marxist-inspired state ideology, nomadism was associated with marginality, deviance, and poverty. Since the formation of the nation-states and the establishment of the industrial economy, the Roma were seen as part of the “nomadic, informal economy, and perceived as outcasts who had escaped from […] the industrial culture” (Clark 2004, 236). The industrial revolution had turned the former Roma artisans, basket makers, metallurgists, etc., into beggars, forced to steal or take advantage of others by developing commercial or trading skills deemed as immoral by the socialist authorities (Achim 2004). Without being properly incorporated into the formal economy, the Roma were perceived by the latter as part of the lumpenproletariat (Stewart 1997; Lucassen 1998). In a Marxist interpretation of the concept, the lumpenproletariat category included people without regular wage labor, beggars, vagrants, unemployable people and other “parasitical groups,” which according to Bussard’s (1987, 677) reading of Marx and Engels’s concept were “remains of older, obsolete stages of social development […] Without a clear class-consciousness, the lumpenproletariat [cannot] play a positive role in society.” The criminalization of (semi)nomads was maybe due to Marx’s interpretation of the lumpenproletariat as an “untrustworthy underclass that could be used by the reactionary forces as their stormtroopers,” due to their lack of class consciousness (Lucassen, Willems, and Cottaar 1998, 151).

Sedentarization, as a particular ideology imposed by nation states, aimed to centralize and consolidate their power and surveillance over their populations (McVeigh 1997; Scott 1999). Influenced by the social evolutionism of modernization theories, (socialist) nation states have imposed sedentarization from above as a normal move toward “civilization, security, and modernity” (McVeigh 1997, 10) with different degrees of enforcement (Barany 2000). Even a relatively weak enforcer of Roma policies, such as Romania, devised a forced settlement policy since the first years of socialism due to a “historic Romanian aversion to nomads” (Crowe 1995, 137). Anthropologist Sam Beck and sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe, who have done fieldwork with Roma political activists, and Roma groups from center and south-western Romania since the 1970s, observed that for the socialist authorities, nomadic Roma “deter development and threaten civilization” (Beck 1984, 26).

While many contributions have focused on sedentarization policies as an ideology (McVeigh 1997) or as a state policy (Achim 2004; Barany 2000; Crowe 1995) designed to homogenize the socio-political body, less attention was paid to how sedentarization and administrative resettlement can be seen as (biopolitical) technologies of power attempting to subject the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma to disciplinary practices that would turn them into productive socialist citizens and proletarians. In a 1977 conference, Romania’s president Nicolae Ceaușescu (Romanian Communist Party 1977) urged state authorities to:

[F]orbid the movement of Roma in other counties or the capital city without a work permit and […] impose the cessation and cancellation of permits for seasonal work for those Gypsies that practice their trade outside the bounds of state units and of cooperatives. This should be imposed both in the area of residence and that of other localities with the aim of quickly integrating the Gypsies into socially useful labor.

Thus, the socialist authorities deployed sedentarization as a technology of power that would homogenize the socio-economic space of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma in order to embrace a standardized way of life specific to socialist citizenship. This translated into fixed housing, fixed employment, and compulsory education for their children. However, as Voiculescu (2017) argued, there was a marked difference between how sedentarization as a program was devised and how it was implemented. Because the program was to be implemented at the local level, some nomad groups were able to negotiate it with the local powerholders and police forces in order to continue their itinerant economic practices, while fulfilling some economic activities for the socialist state.

The second main objective for the state authorities was the proletarization of their labor force. As early as the 1930s, the “Soviet legislation against parasites” deemed Roma, itinerants, orphans, and beggars as a “social threat to the social order” and sent them to the Gulag (Fitzpatrick 2006). In time, the category of “social parasite” was extended so that it came to include persons who refused to do “socially-useful work,” among which were included idle youth, traders, speculators, private entrepreneurs, and other persons who worked in the informal economy (Fitzpatrick 2006, 389, 393). The Romanian government regulated the compulsion of formal employment for all citizens through Decree No.153 from 1970, which sanctioned “social parasitism” with imprisonment or forced labor. However, the policy was not rigorously implemented by local authorities (Barany 2000).

The “commercial” activities carried out by some Roma groups were considered signs of independence from the socialist production system. The state authorities confiscated their trade and livelihood means, be it gold, horses, or other means of production and incorporated most of the Roma into the socialist production system. Strict labor discipline, organization, and collective work was needed to combat “social parasitism” and to change their way of life (Barany 2002). The idea of proletarization as the way forward toward assimilation was also at the forefront of the Roma policy in other CEE countries. As Stewart (1997, 100-101) observed for the Hungarian Roma, the socialist authorities expected that formal, regular, and steady employment would provide values for Roma that could trickle down to other aspects of their lives. The assessment made by the Central Committee (CC) of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) (Romanian Communist Party 1977) stated that:

The local party and state bodies acted in order to establish the Gypsy population in the locality and to include them in a productive activity. Thus, some popular councils helped them [the Roma] build houses, enticing them at the same time to carry out productive activities within state agricultural enterprises, agricultural production cooperatives, as well as in industrial enterprises.

If most of the precariously assimilated Roma have accepted the socialist social contract and abandoned their traditional crafts to take jobs in the industry or state farms, some Roma, mainly nomadic and semi-nomadic groups such as căldărari (coppersmiths) or gabori (tinsmiths) took advantage of their practical knowledge of traditional crafts and managed to negotiate their position with local authorities to enable them to continue practicing these crafts outside the formal socialist economy (Hașdeu 2005; Asséo, Petcuţ, and Piasere 2018). Since the fall of state socialism, these groups were able to better cope with the socio-economic transformations and used their entrepreneurial skills to develop new niches in the Romanian labor market (Vincze and Hossu 2014).

The target of the proletarization program were the Roma who had already been assimilated or Romanianized. The Roma were less likely to work in agriculture cooperatives because many of them had no land to contribute to, so they were instead encouraged to accept jobs in the heavy industry, mining, or state agricultural farms. The two economic processes, industrialization and cooperativization, managed to render futile most of the traditional trades and changed the lifestyle of the Roma, making them more dependent on the state economy.

As in the case of sedentarization, there was a difference between proletarization as a program and its actual implementation. Anthropological work done in Romania and Hungary (Stewart 1993; Voiculescu 2017) revealed that the Roma did not fully embrace the socialist ideology of labor and continued to use their local knowledge or metis in Scott’s (1999) terms, to practice their informal activities. As Stewart (1993, 192-193) put it: “These [trading in horses, antiques, and other goods, occasional craftwork] were still the ones that they valued, that they held to express the essence of the good life.” The reports issued by the Romanian Securitate show that the Roma did contest the modernization-cum-assimilation programs that were devised for them. Some Roma groups found alternative ways to continue their semi-nomadic lifestyle and practice their traditional crafts through negotiation with the local powerholders, for example, by providing informal services for some level of freedom in their craft. Moreover, Roma traditional leaders and intellectuals were highly active in challenging the regime’s ideological domination, by pressing for the recognition of Roma as a “cohabiting nationality” and granting their own cultural, political, and religious rights. Because the socialist authorities and the Romanian Securitate were eager to repress any initiative of a Romani political movement, most of the practices of contestation entered the domain of everyday forms of resistance or in James Scott’s terms, the “infrapolitics of subordinate groups” (Scott 1990). The everyday forms of resistance practiced by Roma groups and spokespersons tended to contest both the status and ideological domination (Scott 1990, 198) of the socialist authorities and included the drafting of written political statements and letters to party and state bodies, sending “documents with hostile content” to the Romanian department of “Free Europe” radio (an anti-socialist propaganda radio backed up by the US), circulating poems and tales about the “enlightenment” of Roma, embracing dissident subcultures such as the Protestantism, organizing cultural events, and last but not least, the refusal of sedentarization policy by adopting counter-conduct strategies such as bribing local officials (Marin 2015b). These everyday forms of resistance were developed as counter-conducts to the biopower and biopolitical regulations embedded in the modernization-cum-assimilation programs, which allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma with profound depoliticizing effects, which will be further discussed in the next section.

The Depoliticization of the Socialist Integration-cum-Assimilation Programs

After the short-lived interest of the Romanian socialist authorities toward the Roma at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, the reports issued by the central bodies of the Romanian Workers’ Party, subsequently renamed the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), and the Securitate were abandoned for almost three decades, until the end of 1970s and the 1980s when the “Roma question” became once again a main concern for the socialist authorities. This time, it was not only the sedentarization of semi-nomadic and nomadic Roma that came to the forefront of the Romanian’s socialist authorities’ actions, but also the political pressure of Roma spokespersons for the Roma groups to be recognized as a “cohabiting nationality,” actions that were labeled as “Gypsy nationalism” (Fosztó 2018) by the socialist authorities.

In 1983 a new report from the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the RCP made an assessment of the RCP’s programs to integrate the Roma population. The “Roma question” had sparked once again the socialist authorities’ interest due to a 354% increase in the number of self-identified Roma at the 1977 census, compared with the last census, 11 years earlier. Moreover, the Romanian authorities have gathered data through the Ministry of Internal Affairs on their employment status. The lack of employment among Roma was quite high, with 32% of men and 48% of women being considered unemployed. The situation of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma was even more worrying, 91% of them did not have a formal and stable form of employment (Romanian Communist Party 1977). The same report identified more than 80,000 Roma who were fit for work but did not carry out “a useful activity for society.” According to the RCP’s report, out of the total of 66,470 nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma, only 5,600 performed useful activities, most of them temporarily. Out of these, only 900 were skilled laborers, the rest being unskilled (Romanian Communist Party 1977). As a result, the CC of the RCP had set up in the late 1970s a Demography Commission at national and county level to study the “issue of Gypsy integration” (Crowe 1995). The measures targeting the nomadic and semi-nomadic but also the more assimilated Roma were the same as those drafted by the socialist authorities in the 1950s. This involved the restriction of mobility on the territory of the country without a registered license, the allocation of housing or plots of land for the Roma to build their own housing, the registration of Roma in administrative records and their incorporation in the socialist production system, especially in agricultural state farms or craft cooperatives, where the Roma could perform an activity compatible with their traditional qualifications.

Despite the assimilation programs initiated in the 1970s, the conclusions of the report prepared by the CC blamed the Roma for maintaining their “backward way of life” and nonsocialist attitudes, such as social parasitism, nomadic lifestyle, and non-registration with local institutions. The report revealed the socialist approach to the Roma question, labeling them as an antisocial category rather than as an ethnic group.

Finally, the report prepared by the RCP (Romanian Communist Party 1977) presented avant la lettre measures in the field of social policies, conditioning some social benefits on the employment of parents or the participation of Roma children in compulsory education. In this way, it anticipated the shift to contractual approaches in the field of social policies developed during the transition to the (neoliberal) market economy Thus, while drawing attention to the overrepresentation of Roma households (which do not carry out an activity “useful to society” or were “parasites”) in receiving childbirth allowances, the socialist elites proposed the payment of these allowances and benefits for families with many children only based on the participation of one parent in an activity “useful to society.” Also, the provision of meals for (poor) Roma children was linked to regular school attendance.

After the CC’s assessment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the interest in the modernization-cum-assimilation programs that targeted the Roma declined due to Romania’s austerity program that halved the investments in Roma-financed programs. Instead, more attention was paid to the heterogenous practices of contestation of Roma spokespersons and intellectuals, which claimed their political, ethnical, and cultural place in the Romanian ethnic landscape, practices which were labeled as “Gypsy nationalism” by the Securitate (Marin 2015b).

The assessment made by the CC of the RCP raises questions about the neutral use of research data. The issue raised here does not refer to the need to collect data or not, but rather how the production of knowledge (data) about the Roma is related to the legitimation, power, and depoliticization of complex, delicate problems. Expertise denotes a form of authority that is often legitimized by the need to collect neutral and reliable data. The accumulation of expertise and knowledge by different authorities gives them legitimacy for their plans and strategies precisely because they have an image of what needs to be governed (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006). A clear example can be drawn from the censuses.

The number of Roma in the socialist censuses has fluctuated depending on the rules that permitted the self-ascription as Roma (native language or ethnicity). In the 1948 census, 53,425 persons have declared Romani as their mother language, almost half from the previous census taken in 1930. Because most forcibly settled Roma have given up their native language as a first sign of assimilation in the Romanian society, the Roma registered in the 1948 census were considered to be nomads and, thus, the primary target for sedentarization (Crowe 1995). Based on field research done by a government-sponsored researcher, the “real” number of Roma was estimated at almost 400,000 persons, out of which 113,000 were nomadic and seminomadic Roma (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1951, 19-20). Later, the number of self-ascribed Roma in the census varied up and down but at the 1977 census 227,398 or 1.05% of the total population self-identified as Roma, an increase of 354% from the census taken 11 years earlier. The socialist authorities did not trust the numbers from the census and ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to take a parallel census, a task which the Ministry accomplished together with the National Commission for Demography. Using the state’s repressive apparatus to count the Roma was a practice used frequently by nation-states (Lucassen, Willems, and Cottaar 1998; Surdu 2019), because the Roma were often labeled as a deviant social group. The number of Roma hetero-identified by the police census reached 541,000, of which 474,000 Roma were categorized as sedentary, 66,500 as semi-nomads, and 500 as nomads. It is not clear what practices of hetero-identification were used by the police and experts, but one may assume that alongside racial characteristics, the lack of fixed residence, a stable job in a socialist entity or lack of school attendance for their children could have been additional indicators for labeling a person/household as Roma (cf. Surdu 2019).

Moreover, in order for the socialist authorities to legitimize the necessity of the urgent measures that needed to be taken vis-à-vis the Roma, the reports issued over time by the party structures used less social research done by governmental and policy experts and more a pre-defined, general stock of knowledge that had accumulated over time in the policy driven reports. Thus, the same remarks of Roma living in “unsanitary conditions, in tents and houses built of adobe, without ventilation and light,” or regarding the numerous Roma families that live in a “single room, sleeping tree to four people, of different ages and sexes, in a single bed, in promiscuity” could be found in the reports issued in the early 1950s as well as those issued in the early and late 1970s (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b, 1972; Romanian Communist Party 1977). Another case of pre-defined stock of knowledge that the Romanian authorities used was the “hygienic-sanitary condition of the Gypsies,” who were evading the medical-sanitary controls and immunization programs, which determined “an increased frequency of infant mortality, venereal diseases, typhoid fever, tuberculosis,” within the Roma communities (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b; Romanian Communist Party 1977). This stock of knowledge that circulated over decades functioned as typifications (Schutz and Luckmann 1989) through which the powerholders could subdue the object of governing to a “limited set of familiar, recurrent features that can be adequately interpreted and dealt with in order to achieve desired outcomes” (Wamsiedel 2021, 4).

The results of the 1977 census, the police-led parallel census and the pre-defined stock of knowledge used by the socialist authorities in their policy driven reports have led to a full assimilationist program devised by the latter in the fields of employment, education, health, housing, and identity documents. The data collected by the socialist authorities through censuses and the national and local demography commissions have allowed the former to devise biopower and biopolitical regulations through which the life of the Roma could be enhanced, optimized, and fostered.

Many Gypsies have various diseases with mass spread. Among the Gypsy population, there is an increased frequency of infant mortality, venereal diseases, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, etc. It was found that outbreaks of parasitism (lice) are found almost exclusively in localities with a compact population of Gypsies. […] State and local health officials were to locate all dilapidated houses in which “families have been infected with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases,” as well as those housing “families with parasites.” Infected housing was to be destroyed. Health authorities were to immunize Gypsies and to conduct monthly health and hygienic check-ups in areas with large Roma concentrations. The ministries of Health and Labor were to study the decree adopted by the Central Committee on June 14, 1980, that placed restrictions on families with more than five children and ensure that if government subsidies were paid for large families, “one of the parents is employed in a useful social activity and that the children attend compulsory schooling.” The Ministry of Education was also to develop better means to ensure that Roma children from poor, large families could “benefit from a proper education.” (Romanian Communist Party 1977)

While the regulations imposed by the socialist authorities had ambiguous results on the ground, the Romanian scholar and Gypsyologist Viorel Achim is more trenchant and links the failure of the socialist integration policies to the particular characteristics of the Roma population and more precisely to what he calls “explosive demographic growth” and “demographic behavior,” which has created a “civilizational gap” between Roma and non-Roma (Achim 2004, 199). However, Achim does not analyze the logically prior problem that the Roma minority was problematized by the socialist regime as a deviant and antisocial group rather than in ethnic terms. For example, although he and other researchers (Achim 2004; Voicu and Popescu 2006) have focused on the regime’s pro-natalist policy after 1966 and its effect on the Roma families, these approaches have focused mostly on government policies. There was little discussion about how the problematization of the “Roma question” in social and behavioral terms rather than ethnic terms has allowed the state authorities to devise strategies and practices through which the health and fertility of Roma women came under the attention of governmental policies (Keil and Andreescu 1999). Although abortion was forbidden since 1966 and women were encouraged to bear four or more children (receiving some privileges), some demographers like Emil Mesaroș (member of National Commission on Demography until 1985) called for containing the Roma’s “exaggerated reproduction,” which was determined by their “social and cultural backwardness” (Kligman 1992, 384). As a result, and in contradiction to the general anti-abortion policies, in some parts of Romania, Roma women could legally make abortions (Kligman 1992), or as one party document from 1981 claimed, Roma women could be administered birth control pills as an exception, so that “in the next decade, 30–40% of the newborn children will not be Gypsies” (Romanian Communist Party 1981, 222). In light of these demographic anxieties, the RCP changed its official policy and reduced the generous child benefits for families with more than five children, with the exception of parents who were engaged in socially useful activities and whose children were all already enrolled in compulsory education (Barany 2000). Although this measure targeted the entire population, it was visibly addressed to the Roma population who preferred to live on child allowances and did not compel their children to attend school, thus contradicting Achim’s statement that in Romania “no measures of racial nature were taken and there were no special laws for the Gypsies” (Achim 2004, 200).

Thus, the problematization of the “Roma question” in social rather than ethnic or cultural terms allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, depoliticizing the discriminatory practices associated with these interventions. As Liégeois and Gheorghe (1995, 12-13) aptly put it:

Roma/Gypsies are thought to have no linguistic, cultural, or ethnic roots. They are instead a ‘social problem’ requiring ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘reintegration’, who can – and must – be brought back into the fold of ‘society’. This is how cultural questions are reclassified as ‘social problems’; it is this vision which lies behind the assumed duty – and thus the right – of active [state] intervention, and gives rise to measures of ‘assistance’ opening up the way for full-scale drives aimed at ‘reintegration’ and ‘rehabilitation’. These flawed analyses encourage a focus on the consequences of a given situation (such as health problems, poverty, illiteracy, etc., rather than on their root causes (rejection, inappropriate provision, etc.). Another perverse effect of the development and use of this kind of imagery: since it categorizes Roma/Gypsies in social rather than ethnic or cultural terms, it means that neither their authors, nor the law, consider the resulting measures are discriminatory.

The use of discourses of “socially unadaptable” and “culturally backward” Roma has been intensively used by the socialist regimes in the region. In Czechoslovakia, party intellectuals and pro-regime scholars articulated the “Roma question” as “cultural differences between Czechoslovak and [G]ypsy populations,” in which Romani culture was associated with social backwardness and criminality, for which “correction” measures would be implemented through assimilation policies (Sokolova 2008, 92-93). In Bulgaria, the “cultural backwardness” of Roma was portrayed as a result of the “exploitation by capitalists,” while socialism would create “cultured, advanced, and educated [Roma]” (Silverman 1986, 52). The constant use of the discourses regarding the “culturally backward,” “deviant,” and “unadaptable” Roma enabled repertoires of representation that helped delineate the Roma from the non-Roma by “articulating ethnic difference without using the rhetoric of ethnicity” (Sokolova 2008, 13).

Conclusions

Although the Roma have played a part in Romania’s ethno-political landscape since the 14th century, they did not meet the Marxist-Leninist criteria for being granted the status of a national minority during socialism. They had no common territory, no common language, and no awareness of their own history and, thus, were rather recognized as a socio-economic category that needed to be reformed, sedentarized, and assimilated in order to follow a socialist way of life. Not being recognized as a national minority during socialism had consequences for their representation in state institutions and in the provision of public services. The modernization-cum-assimilation programs implemented by the socialist authorities were permanently doubled by political discourses and public policies that repeatedly drew borders between non-Roma and Roma citizens, who were often represented as “cultural backwards,” “work shy,” and “an obstacle to modernization.” This legitimized the socialist policies of residential and educational segregation, dispersal of large compact communities, and the incorporation of economically active Roma into a system of racialized proletarianization, through which the Roma were assigned jobs with lower socio-economic work status (Băncescu and Calciu 2014). The repressive measures embedded in the socialist model of assimilation has led Ian Law (2012) to label them as a case of “red racism” within socialist states (by replacing biological racism with cultural racism), although political elites viewed the issue of racism as an essentially Western problem. Also, Roma organizations have been banned or limited to surveilling and controlling Roma communities. In the end, the socialist state intended to replace a more pastoral power delegated through traditional leaders with a form of biopower embedded in modern institutions (schools, factories) that would discipline the Roma in becoming productive and good proletarians and socialist citizens.

In the article, I examined the two main processes that affected the various Roma groups, sedentarization and proletarization, not as state policies, but as programs and technologies of power, specific to a socialist governmentality. A (socialist) governmentality perspective undergirded the political programs, expert commissions, ministry regulations, and the embedded knowledge that underpinned the Roma modernization-cum-assimilation programs deployed by the socialist authorities. The micro-scale and the everyday interventions of the socialist technologies of power might explain the different degrees of integration, that some studies have revealed during post-socialism (e.g., Vincze 2014). Thus, instead of a top-down implementation of the socialist modernization-cum-assimilation programs, the responsibilities were transferred to local authorities, which had to ensure a space for housing and access to employment. The differential local enforcement of these regulations also explains the different degrees of integration/exclusion of various Roma groups after the fall of state socialism. During the latter, various (often traditional) Roma groups that had escaped the strict incorporation into the socialist economic system, have managed to better cope with the socio-economic transformations and used their entrepreneurial skills and knowledge to penetrate new niches in the CEE markets. On the other side, the more assimilated Roma that have accepted the socialist contract and were incorporated in the socialist production system, in industry or state (agricultural) cooperatives, even if at its lower rungs, have lost their traditional occupations and were made more dependent on the state economy. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, most of the Roma that were once dependent on the state economy are now adversely incorporated in the post-communist market system as a cheap, precarious, and exploitable labor force for the local and transnational capital (Vincze et al. 2019).

Finally, I critically interrogated the neutral use of knowledge in governing Roma-related affairs. The data collected by the socialist authorities through censuses, the repressive state apparatus, and the national and local demography commissions have allowed the former to devise biopower and biopolitical regulations through which the life of the Roma could be enhanced, optimized, controlled, and fostered. The regulations allowed the state authorities to develop strategies and practices through which the state could intervene in the daily lives of the Roma, depoliticizing the discriminatory practices associated with these interventions, because the latter were labeled as social (correcting the backwardness of the Roma) and not ethnic. The “will to know” and to govern has continued to play an important role in governing Roma-related affairs during (neoliberal) market economies, when intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and UNDP and European institutions (e.g., European Commission), have sought to “govern at a distance” using techniques such as statistics, indicators, and benchmarks that help govern the conduct of states when regulating Roma-related policies. More research should be done on how policy and political discourses and the collection and circulation of ethnic data after the fall of the Iron Curtain had rather ambiguous results. The framing of discourses and assembling of data led to discriminatory practices and the culturalization (read ethnicization) of complex socio-economic problems that displaced the Roma plight from the social justice agenda toward ethnicized interventions, albeit it is not clear how far this has gone.