Was There a Socialist Governmentality?

In an oft-quoted lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1978-1979, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” which was less on biopolitics per se and more on the birth of (neo)liberalism, Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 99-100) was doubtful regarding the existence of a “socialist governmental rationality” or governmentality. He argued that socialism has rather incorporated liberal modalities of power without developing its own form of government. In his previous lecture from 1975-1976, “Society must be defended,” Foucault (Reference Foucault1997) suggested that the socialist state could be analyzed as a biopolitical state. The French scholar implied that the biopolitical and biopower practices of the capitalist state were never contested by the socialist state but rather they were “taken up, developed, reimplanted, and modified […] in certain respects” (1997, 261). The socialist state has also imported the racist premises of the biopolitical modalities of power but managed to redeploy them not into an ethnic racism but a “racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism” (Foucault Reference Foucault1997, 261), which was widely present when dealing with Roma groups in CEE. At the same time, in the realm of the economic discourse, the socialist state has managed to transform the historical discourse of race war into a revolutionary discourse of class struggles. Once it was inscribed in the official state discourse, the revolutionary discourse could eliminate class enemies as though they were racial enemies (cf. Foucault Reference Foucault1997). Although they were not part of the traditional enemies of the state, the bourgeoisie or the nobility, the Roma (especially the nomadic and semi-nomadic) were considered part of the lumpenproletariat, a “dangerous class” (Bussard Reference Bussard1987) without a clear class-consciousness or a progressive role in history.

In order to “turn this poor and marginalized minority into good socialist citizens” (Stewart Reference Stewart1997, 6), the socialist authorities in the region have subjected the Roma to technologies of power and techniques of government that would work on the individual body in order to increase their productivity and discipline and subject them to state power rather than community or traditional leaders (pastoral power). The proletarization and sedentarization of Roma were the two main technologies of power that would discipline the Roma to act like good socialist citizens and proletarians. As I will show in the following sections, these technologies of power and programs deployed by the socialist state were embedded in forms of knowledge that were meant to expose the backwardness of Roma, thus legitimizing the modernization-cum-assimilation programs devised by the socialist powerholders.

Much of Foucault’s conceptual instruments and work on governmentality have been applied in the context of Western democratic societies and in (neo)liberal regimes of power (Rose and Miller Reference Rose and Miller1992; Rose Reference Rose, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996, Reference Rose1999; Barry, Osborne, and Rose Reference Barry, Osborne and Rose1996; Lemke Reference Lemke2019), while less scholarly work was done on grasping its application in illiberal societies, which adopted an “authoritarian governmentality” (Dean Reference Dean2010, 155-174). In particular, a socialist governmentality was considered less applicable in the space of the CEE countries because the governmental power targeted less the population but rather the means of production and the regulation of the economy by “administering things, regulating the process of production, [and] mobilizing the material domain” (Valiavicharska Reference Valiavicharska2010, 3). On the other hand, Prozorov (Reference Prozorov, Prozorov and Rentea2017, 100) argues that the object of socialist biopolitics was not “life as it was but life as it must become.” As alluded to above, the socialist revolution was not in its foremost focused on the protection of the nation state against the (racially) external or internal Other but rather on the transformation of society, which had at its center the blurring of distinctions between the self and the other, by targeting “the given self in the name of the Otherness that it must become” (Prozorov Reference Prozorov, Prozorov and Rentea2017, 100), which was the formation of the “new Soviet man.” Thus, the socialist biopolitics was focused on the transformation of life rather than on its protection, an argument which was also embraced by Valiavicharska (Reference Valiavicharska2010) in her depiction of the socialist modes of governance.

While power in non-liberal societies may be exercised more through its disciplinary and biopower mechanisms rather than through techniques of self-government more applicable to (neo)liberal forms of rule, the governmentality analytic framework is suitable to the study of the state-socialist system. For example, Sigley (Reference Sigley2006, 491) refers to “socialist arts of government” which “governs not through familiar tactics of ‘freedom and liberty,’ but through a distinct planning and administrative rationality.” Therefore, a socialist government “claims that, not only is it possible to know in detail the object to be governed, but, furthermore, it is possible to predict the precise outcome of any possible intervention” (Sigley Reference Sigley1996, 473).

In his reflections on authoritarian or non-liberal forms of governmentality, Dean (Reference Dean2010) pinpoints that the socialist government did take up the task of exercising biopower, “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault Reference Foucault1978, 137). Biopower is a normalizing power, whose goal is to reinforce the social system against “abnormal” or potentially dangerous individuals, e.g., the mentally ill, political adversaries, or in this case, the (semi)nomadic and unruly Roma. In order to grasp how the socialist governmentality was deployed toward the Roma, we need to understand the political rationalities, the discursive fields in which the problems to be governed emerged, were defined and for which solutions were proposed, and the technologies of power and programs that helped materialize the political rationalities. Thus, political programs, reports on Roma, expert commissions, ministry regulations were instruments of governmentality through which the governance of the “Roma question” took shape. The technologies of government and programs deployed toward the Roma will be discussed further in the article, after a short description of the Roma’s place in the Romanian socialist ethno-political landscape.

The peculiar conditions of the Roma in Romania call for their specific treatment, as I endeavor to do in this article. While the majority of East European Roma were long sedentary by the beginning of the communist rule, particularly in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia, Romania still had a considerable share of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma (around 30%) who posed “security” problems to the socialist state (Barany Reference Barany2002). Second, since the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, the formation of the nation-states and the emergence of industrial production, the Roma groups were framed as not yet being part of the formal economy. They were less integrated into the formal industrializing economy, while their lack of access to land made their incorporation into agricultural state cooperatives rather unlikely (Chelcea Reference Chelcea1944).

The Roma in the Romanian Socialist Ethno-Political Landscape

The first census taken by the Romanian socialist authorities in 1948 did not register ethnicity but only native language. The census registered almost 15.9 million inhabitants, of which 13.6 million Romanian speakers, which meant 85.6% of the total population. The Hungarian-speaking population numbered almost 1.5 million (9.4%) and the German-speaking population almost 344 thousand (2.2%). Only 53.425 people registered Romani as their native language (0.3% of the population), which was slightly over half the number registered at the previous census in 1930 (Golopenția and Georgescu Reference Golopenția and Georgescu1948). Although Romania lost territories during this period, the decrease was also due to the linguistic assimilation of many Roma as a route of socio-economic mobility.

The socialist elites continued the policy of ethnic homogenization that was set off during the WWII population exchange programs by allowing many Jewish and German ethnics to out-migrate (Boia Reference Boia2015). According to the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) ruling elite, the issue of national minorities would be solved because the Romanian Constitution gave rights to “cohabiting minorities” (naționalități conlocuitoare in Romanian) equal to those of the majority population. While the other 13 ethnic minorities that lived on the territory of Romania could be recognized as cohabiting minorities and granted some cultural and political rights, the Roma minority had a particular place in the ethno-political landscape. As most of the CEE states that came under the Soviet tutelage, Romania adopted the Marxist-Leninist model for dealing with national minorities (Klimova-Alexander Reference Klimova-Alexander2006). The criteria for fulfilling the status of national minority were those of common language, territory, history and a uniform culture, criteria that the Roma did not meet. Hence, they were not recognized as a national minority but rather as a socio-economic category that needed to be reformed, enhanced and incorporated into the socialist production system in order to follow a socialist way of life. In one of his main reflections on the “national question,” Stalin remarked (Reference Stalin and Stalin1953, 303. 307, 308):

Some Roma leaders tried to re-organize immediately after 1948 under the inter-war umbrella organization General Union of Roma in Romania (GURR) with the goal to obtain the status of national minority, but their claims were rejected by the socialist nomenklatura. Afterward, they have tried to set up a new proletarian-based party, the Roma People’s Union in Romania, but even this request was rejected by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the grounds that the organization’s structure no longer corresponded to that of the new “democratic committees” (Achim Reference Achim2010).

With the regime change in the late 1940s, the sedentarization of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma became part of the “civilizing” plans of the socialist authorities, which aimed to “materially and spiritually raise” those parts of the population (national minorities or certain social categories) that were socially, culturally, and politically disenfranchised during the old capitalist regime.

In an early assessment done by the RWP in 1949, the “Roma question” was primarily a “social problem” for which educational, health and social assistance measures needed to be devised in order to properly subject the Roma to the discipline of the socialist economic system (Achim Reference Achim2010). The assimilated Roma did not pose a special concern for the socialist authorities, which were more preoccupied (in the beginning) with the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma.

Unlike the more assimilated and Romanianized Roma, who were more prone to comply with the regulations of the state, nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma were “unmarked citizens,” who simply escaped the gaze of the nation-state, which could not impose its taxation and control functions upon them (Scott Reference Scott1999). As another official document from 1949 issued by the RWP stated: “The nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma don’t fulfill their military service, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get married at the registry office, they don’t have an ID or patronyms [family name] […]. By changing their names, they try to confuse the authorities so that they cannot be tracked down” (Romanian Workers’ Party 1949). In other words, the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma were not yet modern citizens recognized by the (socialist) nation-state.

Their sedentarization and incorporation into the socialist production system was considered to be hampered by the traditional Roma leaders, wealthy landowners (moșieri and chiaburi, in Romanian), and other “reactionary forces” that sought to exploit their cheap labor for their own benefit. In the first documents issued by the Romanian socialist authorities in the early 1950s, the cause of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma was framed in the revolutionary discourse of class struggles. The governmental reports issued in the early 1950s revealed that not only the landowners but also Roma traditional leaders and other members of the Roma groups exploit the cheap labor force of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma:

While their labor force was exploited by the Roma traditional leaders and “remnants” of the bourgeoisie, their life conditions were plagued by poor living conditions, immiseration, poverty-related diseases, malnutrition, tuberculosis, pellagra, syphilis, and a high infant mortality rate (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952a). The depictions provided by the document reveal a striking resemblance to the ways in which Engels portrayed the lives of the working class in mid-nineteenth century England (Engels Reference Engels1987). For the sedentarization of the Roma, the socialist authorities devised a modernization-cum-assimilation program which included the prohibition of movement on the territory of the country “for carts without registered licenses,” the allocation of housing or plots of land for the Roma to build (with the help of the state) their own housing, their incorporation into a stable form of employment, the enrollment of adults in literacy courses and children in the state education system and the provision of health education (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b, 1952a).

For scholars such as Viorel Achim (Reference Achim2010), Cătălin and Elena Zamfir (Reference Zamfir and Zamfir1993), and Zoltan Barany (Reference Barany2002), the measures targeting the (nomadic and semi-nomadic) Roma were part of the mainstream public policies enforced by the Romanian government and not targeted ethnic policies. I will critically engage with this scholarship and argue that Romania’s Roma were subjected to specific technologies of power and programs which allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, with profound depoliticizing effects. I will discuss in the next section two of these technologies of power, sedentarization, and proletarization.

Sedentarization and Proletarization as Technologies of Government

The Romanian socialist authorities were active in addressing the “Roma question” as soon as they came into power. Romania was one of the first states in CEE to endorse a policy of sedentarization toward its nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma at the end of the 1940s. Despite the fact that the latter category represented only one-third of the total Roma population (Marushiakova and Popov Reference Marushiakova and Popov2008), it was a constant concern for Romania’s administrative authorities because of security and public order threats (Achim Reference Achim2010). The Central Committee of the RWP considered the semi-nomadic and nomadic Roma to be the most pressing issue, all the more as the construction of a “multilaterally developed socialist society” was incompatible with the persistence of phenomena of “social backwardness,” such as nomadism, extreme poverty, or the fact that a part of the population remained outside the political and social framework of the state (Marin Reference Marin2015a). This is why the General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie strictly regulated the movement of the nomadic Roma and forbade them to beg, practice fortune telling, or trade.

For the Marxist-inspired state ideology, nomadism was associated with marginality, deviance, and poverty. Since the formation of the nation-states and the establishment of the industrial economy, the Roma were seen as part of the “nomadic, informal economy, and perceived as outcasts who had escaped from […] the industrial culture” (Clark Reference Clark, Saul and Tebbutt2004, 236). The industrial revolution had turned the former Roma artisans, basket makers, metallurgists, etc., into beggars, forced to steal or take advantage of others by developing commercial or trading skills deemed as immoral by the socialist authorities (Achim Reference Achim2004). Without being properly incorporated into the formal economy, the Roma were perceived by the latter as part of the lumpenproletariat (Stewart Reference Stewart1997; Lucassen Reference Lucassen, Lucassen, Willems and Cottaar1998). In a Marxist interpretation of the concept, the lumpenproletariat category included people without regular wage labor, beggars, vagrants, unemployable people and other “parasitical groups,” which according to Bussard’s (Reference Bussard1987, 677) reading of Marx and Engels’s concept were “remains of older, obsolete stages of social development […] Without a clear class-consciousness, the lumpenproletariat [cannot] play a positive role in society.” The criminalization of (semi)nomads was maybe due to Marx’s interpretation of the lumpenproletariat as an “untrustworthy underclass that could be used by the reactionary forces as their stormtroopers,” due to their lack of class consciousness (Lucassen, Willems, and Cottaar Reference Lucassen, Willems and Cottaar1998, 151).

Sedentarization, as a particular ideology imposed by nation states, aimed to centralize and consolidate their power and surveillance over their populations (McVeigh Reference McVeigh and Acton1997; Scott Reference Scott1999). Influenced by the social evolutionism of modernization theories, (socialist) nation states have imposed sedentarization from above as a normal move toward “civilization, security, and modernity” (McVeigh Reference McVeigh and Acton1997, 10) with different degrees of enforcement (Barany Reference Barany2000). Even a relatively weak enforcer of Roma policies, such as Romania, devised a forced settlement policy since the first years of socialism due to a “historic Romanian aversion to nomads” (Crowe Reference Crowe1995, 137). Anthropologist Sam Beck and sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe, who have done fieldwork with Roma political activists, and Roma groups from center and south-western Romania since the 1970s, observed that for the socialist authorities, nomadic Roma “deter development and threaten civilization” (Beck Reference Beck, Shangriladze and Townsend1984, 26).

While many contributions have focused on sedentarization policies as an ideology (McVeigh Reference McVeigh and Acton1997) or as a state policy (Achim Reference Achim2004; Barany Reference Barany2000; Crowe Reference Crowe1995) designed to homogenize the socio-political body, less attention was paid to how sedentarization and administrative resettlement can be seen as (biopolitical) technologies of power attempting to subject the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma to disciplinary practices that would turn them into productive socialist citizens and proletarians. In a 1977 conference, Romania’s president Nicolae Ceaușescu (Romanian Communist Party 1977) urged state authorities to:

Thus, the socialist authorities deployed sedentarization as a technology of power that would homogenize the socio-economic space of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma in order to embrace a standardized way of life specific to socialist citizenship. This translated into fixed housing, fixed employment, and compulsory education for their children. However, as Voiculescu (Reference Voiculescu2017) argued, there was a marked difference between how sedentarization as a program was devised and how it was implemented. Because the program was to be implemented at the local level, some nomad groups were able to negotiate it with the local powerholders and police forces in order to continue their itinerant economic practices, while fulfilling some economic activities for the socialist state.

The second main objective for the state authorities was the proletarization of their labor force. As early as the 1930s, the “Soviet legislation against parasites” deemed Roma, itinerants, orphans, and beggars as a “social threat to the social order” and sent them to the Gulag (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2006). In time, the category of “social parasite” was extended so that it came to include persons who refused to do “socially-useful work,” among which were included idle youth, traders, speculators, private entrepreneurs, and other persons who worked in the informal economy (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2006, 389, 393). The Romanian government regulated the compulsion of formal employment for all citizens through Decree No.153 from 1970, which sanctioned “social parasitism” with imprisonment or forced labor. However, the policy was not rigorously implemented by local authorities (Barany Reference Barany2000).

The “commercial” activities carried out by some Roma groups were considered signs of independence from the socialist production system. The state authorities confiscated their trade and livelihood means, be it gold, horses, or other means of production and incorporated most of the Roma into the socialist production system. Strict labor discipline, organization, and collective work was needed to combat “social parasitism” and to change their way of life (Barany Reference Barany2002). The idea of proletarization as the way forward toward assimilation was also at the forefront of the Roma policy in other CEE countries. As Stewart (Reference Stewart1997, 100-101) observed for the Hungarian Roma, the socialist authorities expected that formal, regular, and steady employment would provide values for Roma that could trickle down to other aspects of their lives. The assessment made by the Central Committee (CC) of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) (Romanian Communist Party 1977) stated that:

If most of the precariously assimilated Roma have accepted the socialist social contract and abandoned their traditional crafts to take jobs in the industry or state farms, some Roma, mainly nomadic and semi-nomadic groups such as căldărari (coppersmiths) or gabori (tinsmiths) took advantage of their practical knowledge of traditional crafts and managed to negotiate their position with local authorities to enable them to continue practicing these crafts outside the formal socialist economy (Hașdeu Reference Hașdeu, Chelcea and Mateescu2005; Asséo, Petcuţ, and Piasere Reference Asséo, Petcuţ and Piasere2018). Since the fall of state socialism, these groups were able to better cope with the socio-economic transformations and used their entrepreneurial skills to develop new niches in the Romanian labor market (Vincze and Hossu Reference Vincze and Hossu2014).

The target of the proletarization program were the Roma who had already been assimilated or Romanianized. The Roma were less likely to work in agriculture cooperatives because many of them had no land to contribute to, so they were instead encouraged to accept jobs in the heavy industry, mining, or state agricultural farms. The two economic processes, industrialization and cooperativization, managed to render futile most of the traditional trades and changed the lifestyle of the Roma, making them more dependent on the state economy.

As in the case of sedentarization, there was a difference between proletarization as a program and its actual implementation. Anthropological work done in Romania and Hungary (Stewart Reference Stewart and Hann1993; Voiculescu Reference Voiculescu2017) revealed that the Roma did not fully embrace the socialist ideology of labor and continued to use their local knowledge or metis in Scott’s (Reference Scott1999) terms, to practice their informal activities. As Stewart (Reference Stewart and Hann1993, 192-193) put it: “These [trading in horses, antiques, and other goods, occasional craftwork] were still the ones that they valued, that they held to express the essence of the good life.” The reports issued by the Romanian Securitate show that the Roma did contest the modernization-cum-assimilation programs that were devised for them. Some Roma groups found alternative ways to continue their semi-nomadic lifestyle and practice their traditional crafts through negotiation with the local powerholders, for example, by providing informal services for some level of freedom in their craft. Moreover, Roma traditional leaders and intellectuals were highly active in challenging the regime’s ideological domination, by pressing for the recognition of Roma as a “cohabiting nationality” and granting their own cultural, political, and religious rights. Because the socialist authorities and the Romanian Securitate were eager to repress any initiative of a Romani political movement, most of the practices of contestation entered the domain of everyday forms of resistance or in James Scott’s terms, the “infrapolitics of subordinate groups” (Scott Reference Scott1990). The everyday forms of resistance practiced by Roma groups and spokespersons tended to contest both the status and ideological domination (Scott Reference Scott1990, 198) of the socialist authorities and included the drafting of written political statements and letters to party and state bodies, sending “documents with hostile content” to the Romanian department of “Free Europe” radio (an anti-socialist propaganda radio backed up by the US), circulating poems and tales about the “enlightenment” of Roma, embracing dissident subcultures such as the Protestantism, organizing cultural events, and last but not least, the refusal of sedentarization policy by adopting counter-conduct strategies such as bribing local officials (Marin Reference Marin2015b). These everyday forms of resistance were developed as counter-conducts to the biopower and biopolitical regulations embedded in the modernization-cum-assimilation programs, which allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma with profound depoliticizing effects, which will be further discussed in the next section.

The Depoliticization of the Socialist Integration-cum-Assimilation Programs

After the short-lived interest of the Romanian socialist authorities toward the Roma at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, the reports issued by the central bodies of the Romanian Workers’ Party, subsequently renamed the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), and the Securitate were abandoned for almost three decades, until the end of 1970s and the 1980s when the “Roma question” became once again a main concern for the socialist authorities. This time, it was not only the sedentarization of semi-nomadic and nomadic Roma that came to the forefront of the Romanian’s socialist authorities’ actions, but also the political pressure of Roma spokespersons for the Roma groups to be recognized as a “cohabiting nationality,” actions that were labeled as “Gypsy nationalism” (Fosztó Reference Fosztó2018) by the socialist authorities.

In 1983 a new report from the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the RCP made an assessment of the RCP’s programs to integrate the Roma population. The “Roma question” had sparked once again the socialist authorities’ interest due to a 354% increase in the number of self-identified Roma at the 1977 census, compared with the last census, 11 years earlier. Moreover, the Romanian authorities have gathered data through the Ministry of Internal Affairs on their employment status. The lack of employment among Roma was quite high, with 32% of men and 48% of women being considered unemployed. The situation of nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma was even more worrying, 91% of them did not have a formal and stable form of employment (Romanian Communist Party 1977). The same report identified more than 80,000 Roma who were fit for work but did not carry out “a useful activity for society.” According to the RCP’s report, out of the total of 66,470 nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma, only 5,600 performed useful activities, most of them temporarily. Out of these, only 900 were skilled laborers, the rest being unskilled (Romanian Communist Party 1977). As a result, the CC of the RCP had set up in the late 1970s a Demography Commission at national and county level to study the “issue of Gypsy integration” (Crowe Reference Crowe1995). The measures targeting the nomadic and semi-nomadic but also the more assimilated Roma were the same as those drafted by the socialist authorities in the 1950s. This involved the restriction of mobility on the territory of the country without a registered license, the allocation of housing or plots of land for the Roma to build their own housing, the registration of Roma in administrative records and their incorporation in the socialist production system, especially in agricultural state farms or craft cooperatives, where the Roma could perform an activity compatible with their traditional qualifications.

Despite the assimilation programs initiated in the 1970s, the conclusions of the report prepared by the CC blamed the Roma for maintaining their “backward way of life” and nonsocialist attitudes, such as social parasitism, nomadic lifestyle, and non-registration with local institutions. The report revealed the socialist approach to the Roma question, labeling them as an antisocial category rather than as an ethnic group.

Finally, the report prepared by the RCP (Romanian Communist Party 1977) presented avant la lettre measures in the field of social policies, conditioning some social benefits on the employment of parents or the participation of Roma children in compulsory education. In this way, it anticipated the shift to contractual approaches in the field of social policies developed during the transition to the (neoliberal) market economy Thus, while drawing attention to the overrepresentation of Roma households (which do not carry out an activity “useful to society” or were “parasites”) in receiving childbirth allowances, the socialist elites proposed the payment of these allowances and benefits for families with many children only based on the participation of one parent in an activity “useful to society.” Also, the provision of meals for (poor) Roma children was linked to regular school attendance.

After the CC’s assessment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the interest in the modernization-cum-assimilation programs that targeted the Roma declined due to Romania’s austerity program that halved the investments in Roma-financed programs. Instead, more attention was paid to the heterogenous practices of contestation of Roma spokespersons and intellectuals, which claimed their political, ethnical, and cultural place in the Romanian ethnic landscape, practices which were labeled as “Gypsy nationalism” by the Securitate (Marin Reference Marin2015b).

The assessment made by the CC of the RCP raises questions about the neutral use of research data. The issue raised here does not refer to the need to collect data or not, but rather how the production of knowledge (data) about the Roma is related to the legitimation, power, and depoliticization of complex, delicate problems. Expertise denotes a form of authority that is often legitimized by the need to collect neutral and reliable data. The accumulation of expertise and knowledge by different authorities gives them legitimacy for their plans and strategies precisely because they have an image of what needs to be governed (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde Reference Rose, O’Malley and Valverde2006). A clear example can be drawn from the censuses.

The number of Roma in the socialist censuses has fluctuated depending on the rules that permitted the self-ascription as Roma (native language or ethnicity). In the 1948 census, 53,425 persons have declared Romani as their mother language, almost half from the previous census taken in 1930. Because most forcibly settled Roma have given up their native language as a first sign of assimilation in the Romanian society, the Roma registered in the 1948 census were considered to be nomads and, thus, the primary target for sedentarization (Crowe Reference Crowe1995). Based on field research done by a government-sponsored researcher, the “real” number of Roma was estimated at almost 400,000 persons, out of which 113,000 were nomadic and seminomadic Roma (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1951, 19-20). Later, the number of self-ascribed Roma in the census varied up and down but at the 1977 census 227,398 or 1.05% of the total population self-identified as Roma, an increase of 354% from the census taken 11 years earlier. The socialist authorities did not trust the numbers from the census and ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to take a parallel census, a task which the Ministry accomplished together with the National Commission for Demography. Using the state’s repressive apparatus to count the Roma was a practice used frequently by nation-states (Lucassen, Willems, and Cottaar Reference Lucassen, Willems and Cottaar1998; Surdu Reference Surdu2019), because the Roma were often labeled as a deviant social group. The number of Roma hetero-identified by the police census reached 541,000, of which 474,000 Roma were categorized as sedentary, 66,500 as semi-nomads, and 500 as nomads. It is not clear what practices of hetero-identification were used by the police and experts, but one may assume that alongside racial characteristics, the lack of fixed residence, a stable job in a socialist entity or lack of school attendance for their children could have been additional indicators for labeling a person/household as Roma (cf. Surdu Reference Surdu2019).

Moreover, in order for the socialist authorities to legitimize the necessity of the urgent measures that needed to be taken vis-à-vis the Roma, the reports issued over time by the party structures used less social research done by governmental and policy experts and more a pre-defined, general stock of knowledge that had accumulated over time in the policy driven reports. Thus, the same remarks of Roma living in “unsanitary conditions, in tents and houses built of adobe, without ventilation and light,” or regarding the numerous Roma families that live in a “single room, sleeping tree to four people, of different ages and sexes, in a single bed, in promiscuity” could be found in the reports issued in the early 1950s as well as those issued in the early and late 1970s (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b, 1972; Romanian Communist Party 1977). Another case of pre-defined stock of knowledge that the Romanian authorities used was the “hygienic-sanitary condition of the Gypsies,” who were evading the medical-sanitary controls and immunization programs, which determined “an increased frequency of infant mortality, venereal diseases, typhoid fever, tuberculosis,” within the Roma communities (Council of Ministers - State Undersecretary for National Minorities 1952b; Romanian Communist Party 1977). This stock of knowledge that circulated over decades functioned as typifications (Schutz and Luckmann Reference Schutz and Luckmann1989) through which the powerholders could subdue the object of governing to a “limited set of familiar, recurrent features that can be adequately interpreted and dealt with in order to achieve desired outcomes” (Wamsiedel Reference Wamsiedel2021, 4).

The results of the 1977 census, the police-led parallel census and the pre-defined stock of knowledge used by the socialist authorities in their policy driven reports have led to a full assimilationist program devised by the latter in the fields of employment, education, health, housing, and identity documents. The data collected by the socialist authorities through censuses and the national and local demography commissions have allowed the former to devise biopower and biopolitical regulations through which the life of the Roma could be enhanced, optimized, and fostered.

While the regulations imposed by the socialist authorities had ambiguous results on the ground, the Romanian scholar and Gypsyologist Viorel Achim is more trenchant and links the failure of the socialist integration policies to the particular characteristics of the Roma population and more precisely to what he calls “explosive demographic growth” and “demographic behavior,” which has created a “civilizational gap” between Roma and non-Roma (Achim Reference Achim2004, 199). However, Achim does not analyze the logically prior problem that the Roma minority was problematized by the socialist regime as a deviant and antisocial group rather than in ethnic terms. For example, although he and other researchers (Achim Reference Achim2004; Voicu and Popescu Reference Voicu and Popescu2006) have focused on the regime’s pro-natalist policy after 1966 and its effect on the Roma families, these approaches have focused mostly on government policies. There was little discussion about how the problematization of the “Roma question” in social and behavioral terms rather than ethnic terms has allowed the state authorities to devise strategies and practices through which the health and fertility of Roma women came under the attention of governmental policies (Keil and Andreescu Reference Keil and Andreescu1999). Although abortion was forbidden since 1966 and women were encouraged to bear four or more children (receiving some privileges), some demographers like Emil Mesaroș (member of National Commission on Demography until 1985) called for containing the Roma’s “exaggerated reproduction,” which was determined by their “social and cultural backwardness” (Kligman Reference Kligman1992, 384). As a result, and in contradiction to the general anti-abortion policies, in some parts of Romania, Roma women could legally make abortions (Kligman Reference Kligman1992), or as one party document from 1981 claimed, Roma women could be administered birth control pills as an exception, so that “in the next decade, 30–40% of the newborn children will not be Gypsies” (Romanian Communist Party 1981, 222). In light of these demographic anxieties, the RCP changed its official policy and reduced the generous child benefits for families with more than five children, with the exception of parents who were engaged in socially useful activities and whose children were all already enrolled in compulsory education (Barany Reference Barany2000). Although this measure targeted the entire population, it was visibly addressed to the Roma population who preferred to live on child allowances and did not compel their children to attend school, thus contradicting Achim’s statement that in Romania “no measures of racial nature were taken and there were no special laws for the Gypsies” (Achim Reference Achim2004, 200).

Thus, the problematization of the “Roma question” in social rather than ethnic or cultural terms allowed the state authorities to legitimize their intervention in the daily lives of the Roma, depoliticizing the discriminatory practices associated with these interventions. As Liégeois and Gheorghe (Reference Liégeois and Gheorghe1995, 12-13) aptly put it:

The use of discourses of “socially unadaptable” and “culturally backward” Roma has been intensively used by the socialist regimes in the region. In Czechoslovakia, party intellectuals and pro-regime scholars articulated the “Roma question” as “cultural differences between Czechoslovak and [G]ypsy populations,” in which Romani culture was associated with social backwardness and criminality, for which “correction” measures would be implemented through assimilation policies (Sokolova Reference Sokolova2008, 92-93). In Bulgaria, the “cultural backwardness” of Roma was portrayed as a result of the “exploitation by capitalists,” while socialism would create “cultured, advanced, and educated [Roma]” (Silverman Reference Silverman1986, 52). The constant use of the discourses regarding the “culturally backward,” “deviant,” and “unadaptable” Roma enabled repertoires of representation that helped delineate the Roma from the non-Roma by “articulating ethnic difference without using the rhetoric of ethnicity” (Sokolova Reference Sokolova2008, 13).