to refer to their citizenship and their ethnicity. Ethnic nationalism differs in principle from civic nationalism, where membership is not based on ethnic belonging; however, both types of nationalism engender racism (see Kymlicka 2000; Brubaker 1999). For example, notwithstanding claims to civic nationalism, the legal protection of racial divisions in the United States lasted for centuries; as Aiwha Ong (2003, 6) writes, ‘racial logic has always lain like a serpent in the sacred ideal of American citizenship’.
11. Nancy Fraser sees subaltern counterpublics as: ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (1992, 123).
12. Warner’s (2002) focus on the transformative possibilities of counterpublics signals their radical potential.
13. Judith Butler (1990) discusses the performative constructions of gender identities, while Fredrik Barth (1969) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2014) show that ethnic and racial identities are performatively deployed in the crucible of economic and political tensions and contingent upon changing relations of power.
14. See debates on the cross-cultural use of ‘race’ in Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999), Shohat and Stam (1994) and Hanchard (2003).
15. Étienne Balibar (2004, 8) defines ‘demos’ as the collective subject of representation, decision making and rights, and ‘ethnos’ as the historical communities based on ethnic belonging. When Roma pass as citizens, unrecognized as Roma, their contribution is appropriated by the ethnos, the ethnic nation.
16. Stuart Hall (1980) argues that Blacks in Britain experienced racial discrimination through class.
17. Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman (1998) made similar observations about the relationship between race and class in Brazil.
18. The European Commission for Culture uses the terms ‘diversity’ and ‘interculturalism’, a version of multiculturalism that focuses on the individual rather than the recognition of groups and is closer to integration and assimilation (see http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/default_en.asp, accessed 1 December 2011). The term ‘multiculturalism’ mobilizes several meanings, from the coexistence of multiple cultures and ethnicities within a territory, to a political ideology. Romania and its different territories have always been multicultural in the first sense. The EU does not espouse multicultural policies, even though legal, rights-based non-discrimination is intrinsic to EU legislation in an increasingly multicultural (in the first sense) EU. The few EU member states that had explicit multicultural legislation in the past, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, have replaced multiculturalism as a political strategy with measures to integrate migrants, especially Muslims.
19. The new long-term strategy, approved in December 2011, recognizes this fact in its name: ‘The Strategy for the Inclusion of Romanian Citizens from the Roma Minority’.
20. Strategia Nationala de Imbunatatire a Situatiei Romilor, Capitolul VII, 2001 (see http://www.anr.gov.ro/html/Biblioteca.html, last accessed 22 March 2010). An official report on the strategy is available at www.publicinfo.gov.ro/library/10_raport_tipar_p_ro.pdf. Romania endorsed several other related public policies, without necessarily initiating them, including: the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015, organized by the World Bank and the Open Society Institute, which involved eight East Central European states; the Common Implementation Strategy for Social Inclusion, 2005–2010, a shared policy between the EU and Romania following the Lisbon Treaty; and the National Plan for Inclusion and Eradication of Poverty, 2002–2012, one chapter of which was devoted to Roma (Preoteasa et al., eds. 2009, 34–38).
21. The number of Roma in Romania varies, depending on the source, from half a million to two million.
22. Figures from the Romanian Parliament website (http://www.cdep.ro/pls/parlam/structura.gp?leg=2008&cam=2&idg=&poz=0&idl=1, accessed 12 September 2010).
23. Wendy Brown (2006) discusses how culture can be used to undermine the very identities it is supposed to highlight, which are seen as ‘being culture’.
24. The existence of state-sponsored cultural institutions for Roma does not necessarily guarantee equal citizenship and inclusion in the nation: compare the ghettoization of Roma museums and theatres in the Czech Republic and Russia respectively. The current National Strategy for Roma (2012–2020) in Romania stipulates the creation of a Roma State Theatre and a Museum of Roma Culture and Civilization. So far only the latter has materialized, yet it is potentially marred by spatial marginalization as it is situated on the outskirts of Bucharest.
25. As Paul Gilroy (2000) argues, culture as a trope of neoliberalism ‘compounds rather than resolves the problems associating “race” with embodied or somatic variation’.
26. Arlene Dávila (2001) defines the ‘politics of suspicion’ in relation to Latinos/as in the United States, where a market-dictated construction of the Latino/a identity became the norm against which people’s authenticity was judged.
27. Aiwha Ong’s (2006) critique of the middle-class aspect of cultural diversity and the Comaroffs’ (2009) argument that class becomes erased in the neoliberal promotion of ethnic identities are relevant here.
28. Here I borrow Ann Stoler’s (2009) reworking of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ (1986). For Deleuze and Guattari minor literature is the work of minority writers who reinvent the dominant language; for Stoler minor history is made for ‘cutting’ across dominant historical narratives (9).
29. Julia Kristeva (1982) defines the abject Other as that which is expelled from the self in order to define the self.
30. See Susan Gal (1991) on nesting East–West dichotomies in Hungary.
31. Other ethnic minorities in the region, including Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and more recently Jews, relate their ethnocultural identities transnationally to other nation-states that support their diasporas (see Verdery, 1994).
