Stat-naţiune, stat naţional şi democraţie în România

Abstract

The article explores the rationale of the Romanian political community as defined by its successive constitutional layouts, since the first fundamental law of 1866, including the Communist constitutional settings, and concluding with the post-communist constitutional design. This consistency of the political community is tested by means of an analytical distinction between the Nation-State and the National State. The former is understood as the institutional underpinning of a community bearing a political project. The latter is seen as the institutional outcome of an ethnic group and the warrant of its political integrity. Such an examination of the Romanian constitutional production sheds light on the historical and unambiguous predominance of the National State, while the Nation State emerged briefly and warily in the Romanian setting in the form of the socialist nation state. By the same token, this approach questions the adequacy between democracy and this rationale of the Romanian political community. While the socialist Nation State, as it was constitutionally designed, failed to guarantee the effectiveness of popular democracy, the Romanian National State, as it was shaped by the successive constitutional texts, pre-communist and post-communist, was always unable to accommodate completely with democracy.