The Nation-State and Multicultural Policies

The article proposes to investigate the possible models of coexistence of majority and minority groups in Romania. Such an attempt requires an outline of minority status and characterization, which the reader finds on the first pages of the article. In the narrower framework of the minority-problem the focus of the paper is religious minority as a community, and the possibilities of the construction of a minority religious identity within a nation-state. This discussion implies the consideration of all the possible relations between religion, state, and nation, also going into the role of the nation-state in ensuring the conditions for practicing religious identity and freedom, both in the case of majority and minority religious communities. In the context of an emerging new type of public sphere, based mainly on communities and not so much on states, the Churches, and thus religious communities are believed to have a crucial role – argues Prof. Frunză, drawing on the work of Peter van der Veer. In the context of the relations between religion and the nation-state, it is repeatedly shown that it pertains to the state’s duties to regulate the position of religious communities in general and religious minorities in particular, because “the ambiguity maintained by not adopting a clear law of religious cults and religious freedom gives birth to frustration and divergent positions”. Then, Romania’s case is put forward, asking the question whether in Romania the nation-state could respond to the need of cultural and religious minorities to assert themselves by dialogue. As a natural direction of this question, one finds a considerable discussion of the relationship between religious cults and the option for democracy, the answer to the question being that there is no significant correlation between these two factors. The analysis of the case for Romania ends with the conclusion that “we must not forget that one of the major premises of European integration is that « those existing collectives that define themselves as communities of solidarity, respect, and moral values will continue the process of cultural reproduction and will not abandon their identity. »”

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