Romania: The Challenges of Contested Industries

The Romanian post-communist legislators rapidly implemented regulations providing facilitated access to the status of Romanian citizens for those former citizens who had lost their Romanian citizenship against their will or for other reasons not imputable to them, an implicit reference to the inhabitants of those territories that Romania lost to the USSR following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The current Republic of Moldova was part of these territorial losses. Within this context, the article aims to explain how the definition of citizenship has evolved in post-communist Romania and the impact of preferential admission to citizenship upon the Romanian-speaking community originating from the RM. The focus of the analysis is the interplay between the demand side (i.e. the procedural elements codifying the existence of ethno-national ties) and the supply side (i.e. the substantive outcomes of preferential access to citizenship within a specific community).