ABSTRACT

Within the meta-story of ethnic unmixing and ethnic cleansing in Central and Eastern Europe, Romania epitomizes a prototypical case. The country was subject to virtually all the elements that mark the transformation of a previously multiethnic state into a more homogeneous entity. Border revisions, population exchanges, forced and voluntary migrations, internal displacement, deportations, pro-natalist population policies, steered internal migration, planned settlement policies as well as genocide all contributed to making Romania ethnically (and socially) largely homogenous. Thus, Romanian political elites increasingly fulfilled the ethno-national imperative of making nation and state congruent. Whereas nearly a third of the population of post-World War I Greater Romania was made up of minorities, only roughly 10 per cent of present day Romania's total population consists of minorities. Minority migration, the focus of this article, contributed greatly, though not exclusively, to this process.