Written by Adina Curt

Both Romania and Hungary are countries with a communist background. The historical past is well known by all of us, citizens of these two nations. What is more important is the cultural shock provided by the communist era: minorities became nonexistent during that time. One of the measures implied by the communist regime that most grievously affected ethnic minorities, especially the Hungarians and to a lesser extent the Germans was the limited education offered in their native languages.

Reconciliation, in this view, consists of restoration and healing. It allows the emergence of a common frame of reference that permits and encourages the communities to acknowledge the past, confess former wrongs and restore broken relationships.

Education is an element of a tremendous importance in the development of each person participating in reconciliation. It should fulfil the individual needs and requirements and it should be adapted in such a manner that the person’s ethnicity or nationality is respected. The infringement of this basic right, by the Romanian communist regime, was the triggering factor of the forthcoming problems of the minorities.

In Romanian families a great importance is put on the education a child receives in his first years of life, the period he spends at home without going to school. In this particular time the child learns the difference between good and bad, he learns the habits of the family, the traditions of his country etc. In the families that are part of a minority group this period is even more important as this is the time when the child learns about his or her heritage and about the values he or she from then on has to embrace and protect. During this particular time a great amount of Romanian children receive xenophobe, racist information from their parent, maybe in an attempt to protect them.

Well, this particular type of attitude, though shameful, is very common through Romanian families. Sociological studies have observed that this situation tends to happen even in educated families, but only when the child is at a young age; when the child goes to school parents tend to encourage their child to accept minorities. Isn’t this confusing? How can you ask from a child that was raised with the values of non-acceptance to grow a conscience of acceptance just because he now goes to school?

This paradoxical status of education in Romanian families’ together with the communist background, are the main factors that gave birth to a tense situation between minorities and the majority. This senseless conflict is constantly present to this day and difficult to understand.

Another important issue are citizenship and nationality which notions should be surveyed separately. David McCrone and Richard Kiely define the difference between the two terms as follows: ‘nationality and citizenship actually belong to different spheres of meaning and activity. The former is in essence a cultural concept which binds people on the basis of shared identity while citizenship is a political concept deriving from people’s relationship to the state. In other words, nation-less and state-less need not be, and increasingly are not, aligned’.

So, the two notions need not to be aligned, but we certainly can remark a connection between them. As nationality can be inherited, it can be described as a term that refers to belonging to a group having the same culture, traditions history, language and other general similarities, citizenship offers the beholder a legal status. This particular legal status is very valuable for people that come from developing countries. For example, the case of Romania or Hungary who’s citizens have been considering themselves as outsiders of the process of development occurring in the European states during the 90s. It is explicable their desire to become European citizens in their full legal rights to travel and to work in developed countries. Citizenship is relational; it is simultaneously an individual and collective phenomenon which is created, activated and transformed in specific institutional practices.

Citizenship is a privilege. In democratic states, becoming citizen of a country means that one has equal access to a comprehensive set of rights as well as to move freely within the country’s territory. This goes for unitary as well as for federal systems of government. In the EU, citizenship takes on a particular ‘nested’ form of membership. Theoretically, nested citizenship signifies that a citizen is simultaneously a member on different levels of political organization, most typically on the level of the basic units and on the central level. More precisely, in the case of Romania and Hungary: they are both member states of the European Union, so even if at a primary level they still maintain a border between them they are also parts of a bigger entity, at European level they are not separated, they are united, therefore the saying: “Unity in diversity”.

The Nation state is based on political and social membership. The political level is important, as the notion of politics is indispensable and its influence can be seen everywhere. But in the matter of minorities and majority reconciliation this political level needs to be changed and in order to be able to influence the political dimension of the issue we, as citizens, must firstly try to influence the social dimension: one by one, little by little, child and adult, Romanian and Hungarian, we all have to show that we are most of all noble beings.

The reconciliation must be built through the will of the population by living together and building a common future. We may be different but isn’t it a better choice to put aside our differences, than to deepen the gap between us? The habits within our cultures that feed the conflict must evolve into a new repertoire of behaviours that can serve as a basis for a culture of peace.

Putting aside the theoretical dimension if the controversy created by the distinction between the nationality and the citizenship of minorities we have to acknowledge that the sole important factor of development is the desire; the desire of perseverance and reconciliation. The nature of reconciliation is in fact founded on a culture of peace. Herbert C. Kelman defines very well this nature by stating that: “reconciliation is a necessary process to stabilize peaceful relations. The essence of reconciliation involves socio-psychological processes consisting of changes in motivations, goals, beliefs, attitudes and emotions by the majority of society members”.

The modern and contemporary state has rested political membership on a fundamental concept, that of national citizenship, understood as a person’s status as citizen of a nation. But what is a nation? What does this term mean today?

My personal example proves the hypothesis of the over-protected child that has received a strict education, in a quasi-nationalist, nest family but that somehow managed to overcome its prejudice. It was not an easy process and, in my opinion it was a waste of my intellectual resources as it would have been so much simpler if society wouldent have educated me in such an uptight way. What I am saying is that I would have preferred to receive a proper education on that mater than to be forced to pass by periods of doubt, ignorance, thousand of questions and mixed feelings in order to understand my position towards minorities.

One of the life changing experiences, in this view, was my participation at the Charta XXI meeting in Strasbourg. I understood there that is ok to consider that two parts exist in this issue. It is ok to state: “I am Romanian” as it is ok to state “I am Hungarian”. There is no shame in embracing your nationality and furthermore there is nothing shameful in acknowledging other’s certain minority status, because for them is not disgraceful to be part of a minority, on the contrary is a very important part of their existence as a human being. At a personal level I reflected on my own condition and I realized that as I am a Romanian, I can never be an American, as I am a woman, I can never be a man, as I am a Christian, I can never be a Buddhist. I can’t because I don’t to have any desire towards it, I am proud of my heritage and I intend to pass it on to my children as it was passed to me by my ancestors. As I was saying, there are two parts, to sides that can only form a whole by being united. We all want to keep our identity the more intact the better and the system, the communism, somehow managed to create in our minds that maybe the other part is trying to alter this particular heritage of our cultural identity.

In my opinion, the first step toward reconciliation requires viewing this conflict as solvable and recognizing that both sides have legitimate contentions, goals and needs that must be satisfied in order to establish peaceful relations.

In Romania, more precisely in the Inter-Carpathian arch the minority- majority contact happens on a daily basis. In cities like Cluj, and like Sfantu-Gheorghe the interaction between individuals from different communities is a daily occurrence, but a large portion of Romanian do not, in an entire life-time, interact with individuals from different communities. The lack of such intermingling of communities is an obstacle to reconciliation and a meaningful education in the spirit of acceptance. The more important as in the capital city, in Bucharest the massive part of information is the one received from the media that often tends to portray the minorities in a negative way in order to “sell” their spectacular information to the public.

With relevance not least to issues I raise, Thomas Hylland Eriksen provides a thoughtful theoretical reflection on contemporary conditions of cultural complexity. He discusses three ways of conceiving complexity within social sciences as a matter of social relationships, individual human attributes or ways of looking at the world. Further, Eriksen distinguishes between social and cultural dimensions of axes relating to exclusion and inclusion, ideas of openness and closure, enforcement and choice under conditions of complexity. His argument prompts us to closely consider the meanings of ethnic and cultural diversity, while having implications for today’s ubiquitous public concerns about ‘integration’

My idea is that, along with the changing of mentalities, a great way to achieve reconciliation is to immerse both communities in a cultural exchange in order to see past differences and glimpse into similarities between cultures.

Reconciliation should be, above all, about recognizing the superiority and importance of peace as a value and practice. From a personal perspective, this requires the following six bases: mutual knowledge, mutual acceptance, mutual understanding, respect for differences and focus on similarities and development of cooperative relations.

As I was saying in the beginning, my entire thesis is founded on a problem that I have observed in the educational system, even if we consider the National educational system or the informal education that a child receives in the family. The more obvious strategy is to try to influence and to educate in the spirit of acceptance the younger population. This can easily be targeted through the Educational system, the schools. In implementing some measures that require civic education classes structured on the stated six bases plan the Educational system can create a generation of children free of prejudices and keener on acceptance and tolerance. Also, by educating the younger generation the long term prevision is that they would be able to form, in their future families, a second generation of children educated in that spirit and the process would repeat itself in a continuous manner. We know that the reconciliation process begins when the parties involved start to change their beliefs, attitudes, goals emotions about the conflict situation, and this can only be achieved with education, both in formal and informal ways.

Along with promoting the values through education as a long term premise of the plan, it is also vital to somehow obtain the support of the media. As I already stated, television channels tend to only broadcast negative events as factors for obtaining a higher audience.

As an alternative and yet powerful tool, I propose the use of the new media means to transmit information to the wide public about the new peaceful goals, the rivalry left in the past and the new values of acceptance that the targeted reconciliation ahead of us. The easiest way to get to know the desire of not only cohabitation but cooperation that exists between communities is actually social media. Social media is emerging as a direct marketing channel and as that should be considered a valuable tool for the promotion of the values of reconciliation. Now is the time to understand that the age of blunt TV advertising to grow popularity of the message is at an end and the future is represented by embracing the specialized, social media marketing, especially when new media channels such as Facebook and Twitter are a fast growing market both in Romania and Hungary.

Being able to share an empathetic dimension, recognizing the other, leads to a relationship that can be modulated through different working structures, with more freedom. It is possible to get closer without the fear of losing ourselves and to leave without feeling guilty for the distance. In this direction it is always fundamental to endure the emotional stress of change, of a search for models, of doubt and of the complexity of a real dimension of cultural pluralism, and a deep personal and institutional commitment is needed in order for people to organize their life, always considering different points of view and habits.

In conclusion, the key words for reconciliation to really take place in Romania are education and desire. However, reconciliation is also about rediscovery of society values, of ethnicity, spirituality and individuality. It is about truth, peace, justice, and acceptance. It is about rediscovering the balance between the individual and the collective, between “us” and “them”, between the “part” and the “whole”.