Autonomy à la carte: The creative claiming tactics of the Hungarian minority in Romania

Abstract

Through a detailed case-study of the Hungarian minority in Romania, this article better understands the non-secessionist, non-violent claims to autonomy of ethnic minorities and the discursive framework in which claims operate. Analysis of policy documents and elite interviews demonstrates how ‘autonomy’ claiming is not only conducted explicitly. Rather, it also occurs creatively through a discursive word-play technique utilized by different minority actors which substitutes ‘decentralization’, ‘regionalization’ and ‘self-governance’ for ‘autonomy’. However, to elites across political persuasions, and unlike differentiations in the scholarly literature, these terms mean the same thing. Moreover, different minority actors have a preferred discourse for claiming: ‘historic autonomists’ favour strong, explicit and symbolic claims while ‘modern autonomists’ support a strategic and creative claiming tactic. These findings of the creativity of autonomy claiming discourse can be extended to other ethnic minorities seeking institutional recognition via non-violent means.