"We are Romanian, not Roma": Nation Branding and Postsocialist Discourses of Alterity

Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“We are Romanian, not Roma”: NationBranding and Postsocialist Discoursesof Alterity†

Nadia Kaneva1 & Delia Popescu2

1 Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208, USA2 Department of Political Science, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214, USA,

This article examines how nation branding intersects with a transnational discourse aboutEurope’s “Roma problem.” We undertake a critical discourse analysis of “Romanians inEurope,” a branding campaign by the Romanian government, implemented in 2008. Weaddress three main questions: What conditions led to the Romanian government’s deci-sion to intervene in the “Roma problem” discourse through a commercial campaign? Howdid the campaign construct a narrative of Romanian national identity, and what wasthe position allotted to Romania’s Roma in it? Finally, what can we learn from this caseabout hierarchies of othering and the politics of national and transnational identities inEurope after the end of the Cold War and in conditions of growing mediatization andcommercialization?

doi:10.1111/cccr.12064

Europe’s “Roma Problem”: Scope and focus of this study

In recent years, news headlines have continually documented a troubling cycleof prejudice and violence against Romani people throughout Europe—burningRoma shanty towns in Italy (e.g., Owen, 2008), expulsions of Romani immigrantsfrom France (e.g., CNN, 2010), and violent anti-Roma rallies in Bulgaria (e.g., WallStreet Journal, 2011) provide just a few examples. In popular discourse, Roma arecommonly painted as a group of miscreants, resistant to social integration, prone to anomadic lifestyle, and attached to a set of cultural values incompatible with Westernmodernity. Such stereotypes feed widespread fears of Roma and are frequentlyexploited by right-wing politicians and vigilantes to legitimize hostile actions againstdomestic or migrant Romani populations.1 At the same time, the grossly inequitablestatus of Romani people across Europe and the history of discrimination againstthem are well documented (e.g., Barany, 2000; FRA & UNDP, 2012; UNDP, 2006).

†Submitted for review to Communication, Culture, and Critique on January 7, 2013.Corresponding author: Nadia Kaneva; e-mail: [email protected]

Communication, Culture & Critique (2014) © 2014 International Communication Association 1

Nation Branding and Postsocialist Alterity N. Kaneva & D. Popescu

As The Economist (2010) summarizes: “On every social index, from income to lifeexpectancy, from illiteracy to health, from criminality to child welfare, the Romaniesdo worse than any other European group. They are not just poor, but also persecuted.”

The confluence of these trends has become known in media and political dis-course as Europe’s “Roma problem.”2 It is commonly asserted that the “problem”originates within the recent European Union (EU) member states from the formercommunist “East,” which count the highest numbers of ethnic Roma among their cit-izens. Bulgaria and Romania—the last two countries to join the EU in 2007—includean estimated 10% and 8% of Roma, respectively, in their populations (Council ofEurope, 2010). As a result of EU expansion, many Eastern European Roma are nowEU citizens and can travel within the Union without entry visas. Thousands havedone just that in search of better living conditions, but the West has not extendedthem a warm welcome; instead, they have been often labeled as criminals and asecurity threat.

The discursive construction of Europe’s “Roma problem” has also unfolded inthe context of a transnational and increasingly commercialized media sphere, andthis is of particular relevance to this study. In this article, we examine how nationbranding—a commercial, media-centric strategy for managing national reputationand identity—intersects with the transnational discourse about Europe’s “Romaproblem.”3 Specifically, we undertake a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of “Roma-nians in Europe,” a nation branding campaign commissioned and funded by theRomanian government and implemented in Italy and Spain between Septemberand November 2008. The choice of Italy and Spain as campaign targets was partlymotivated by recent migration patterns. Romanians in Spain nearly tripled from211,325 in 2006 to 603,889 in 2007 (CEPS, 2011, p. 14). In Italy, the number ofRomanians doubled between 2006 and 2008 to an estimated 796,000 (OECD, 2010,p. 236). Between 2002 and 2006, 50% of Romanian labor migrants were headed toItaly and 24% to Spain (Stan, 2009, p. 6). Among them were many Romanian Roma,although specific percentages are hard to find.

In this context, the campaign “Romanians in Europe” was intended as a defensivereaction to anti-migrant attitudes and as a putative response to public perceptionsabout Romania’s contribution to the “Roma problem.” Arguably the campaign alsorepresents the first systematic use of nation branding by the Romanian state toaddress a transnational political issue. Thus, our analysis is guided by three mainquestions: First, what specific conditions led to the Romanian government’s decisionto intervene in the transnational discourse about Europe’s “Roma problem” througha commercial media campaign? Second, what did the campaign signify in termsof: (a) explicit and implicit messages about a state-endorsed narrative of Romaniannational identity and (b) the particular position allotted to Romania’s Roma in thisnarrative? And, finally, what can we learn from this case about the shifting natureof nationalism and the politics of national and transnational identity as they unfoldin Europe after the end of the Cold War and in conditions of growing mediatizationand commercialization? In addressing these questions, we are primarily interested in

2 Communication, Culture & Critique (2014) © 2014 International Communication Association

N. Kaneva & D. Popescu Nation Branding and Postsocialist Alterity

understanding and exposing structures and relations of power that motivate overt orhidden discrimination against Roma, and the specific manifestation of such discrim-ination within commercialized and media-centric discourses of national identity. Tostate this differently, we are witnessing one particular instance of the mediatizationand marketization of othering.

A hierarchy of othering: Theoretical and methodological considerations

To analyze commercialized, mediated narratives of national identity in postsocialistEurope, we combine theoretical insights from two interdisciplinary debates. On theone hand, we engage with postcolonial theory and especially with evolving notionsof orientalism as a discourse of othering “the East.” Edward Said’s seminal ideas(1978) have since been adapted to discuss the historical and cultural situation ofCentral/Eastern Europe, and the Balkans in particular. Historians Larry Wolff (1994)and Maria Todorova (1997) have argued convincingly that the history of “imagin-ing” Eastern Europe as “other” merits its own theorization. Todorova’s concept of“balkanism” highlights the Balkans’ “transitionary status” between East and Westand the resulting local identities built around metaphors of “a bridge or a crossroads”(p. 15). She argues that, in contrast to “orientalism, which is a discourse about animputed opposition [between East and West], balkanism is a discourse about imputedambiguity” (p. 17, emphasis added).

This state of perpetual ambiguity is particularly relevant to our analysis, as it helpsto explain repeated efforts by Eastern European nation-states (in this case Roma-nia) to defend their “Europeanness.” Bakic-Hayden’s concept of “nesting orientalism”(1995) further complicates the original binary of East versus West.4 Nesting oriental-ism reproduces the East/West antagonism on multiple levels within the boundariesof the East itself; it signals that “the designation of ‘other’ has been appropriated andmanipulated by those who have themselves been designated as such [others] in orien-talist discourse” (Bakic-Hayden, 1995, p. 922). While Bakic-Hayden draws examplesfrom ethno-national tensions in former Yugoslavia, which have resulted in a prolifer-ation of “new” nation states, we would argue that nesting orientalism also applies tothe way East European national majorities treat minorities. Thus, the status of Romaminorities in Eastern Europe is particularly harsh because, lacking a “home” nationstate, Roma are perpetually marked as “foreign” (cf. Imre, 2011).

This argument is in line with Bukowski’s (2006) reconceptualization of orientalismas a discourse of othering that is becoming less dependent on spatial and temporalanchors (e.g., East/Balkans/Middle East vs. West, or modernity vs. backwardness),and morphing into a generalized mode of constructing alterity. As Bukowski states,“Otherness is dissected from an exotic context and brought home, thus displacedprimitives can be found on our doorstep” (2006, p. 476). The trope of “displacedprimitives” appears particularly apt for understanding how a hegemonic Europeandiscourse imagines Roma: Despite centuries-long Romani presence on the continent,neo-orientalism, which permeates both national and transnational imaginaries, relies



on narratives of Romani “foreignness” to account for the uncomfortable existence of“unintegrated” Roma within the European utopia.

Important to our analysis is the observation that “the new orientalism is a refrac-tion, a derivative or correlate of a phenomenon covered by such concepts as glob-alization, the expansion of multinational capital, flexible capitalism, transgressions,migrations, transnationalism or the media-covered global village” (Bukowski, 2006,pp. 465–466). This leads us to engage with an ongoing debate about the changingnature of nationhood in the age of globalization, marketization, and mediatization.The very notion of “nation branding” as a new tool for constructing and managingnational identity is one offshoot of that debate. Contrary to nation branding enthusi-asts who extol its democratizing and pacifying virtues (e.g., Anholt, 2006; van Ham,2001), we examine the oppressive side of branded national identities. We argue thatdiscourses of branded nationhood reproduce hierarchies of othering and can, poten-tially, exacerbate existing intranational patterns of exclusion rather than resolve them.We find evidence in support of this argument in Romania’s use of nation branding inresponse to Europe’s “Roma problem.” Our goal is to add to interdisciplinary, criticalwork on the marketization and commercialization of nationhood, specifically in thecontext of postsocialist Europe (e.g., Jansen, 2008; Kaneva, 2011b; Volcic & Andreje-vic, 2011). To date, this literature has not discussed how power relations betweennational majorities and minorities change when discourses of nationhood are shiftedinto a branding register. We wish to draw attention to this gap and invite further stud-ies on this topic.

Methodologically, we draw on Norman Fairclough’s framework of CDA, whichcalls for a combination of social and cultural analysis with close textual analysis(1995, pp. 53–54). Following Fairclough, we view nation branding as a “genre ofdiscourse,” and we think of the country-specific campaign executions as “com-municative events” comprising various “texts” (pp. 56–57). Fairclough proposesthat CDA should consider three dimensions of communicative acts: “socioculturalpractice,” which concerns sociocultural and historical context; “discourse practice,”which concerns the institutional and intertextual conditions of a text’s productionand consumption; and finally the content of the “text” itself (pp. 57–62). In linewith this approach, the analysis that follows is organized in three sections. First,we situate the campaign in relation to macro-historical events that speak to theroots of Romani alterity in Romania. Second, we reconstruct “discourse practice” bydetailing the circumstances of campaign production and consumption, includinginstitutions involved, costs incurred, justifications made, and public reactions. Werely on agency reports, government documents, and media coverage in Romania,Italy, and Spain, which help to illuminate how campaign messages were intertextuallylinked to other mediated discourses. Third, our analysis of “texts” focuses on verbaland visual elements of print and television advertisements, documentaries, websites,and special events for the campaign. In the conclusion section, we reflect on somebroader implications of this case study for understanding the role of nation brandingin constructions of alterity in postsocialist Europe.



Sociocultural practice: The roots of Romani alterity in Romania

Romania has had a long and complex history of Roma oppression and exclu-sion. Romani tribes, migrating from Northern India, reached the territory ofmodern-day Romania in the 12th century and were enslaved by the local popula-tion. Romani slavery was commonplace throughout the Romanian provinces andwas not abolished until 1864, 3 years after Romania declared independence fromthe Ottoman Empire (Crowe, 1999; Hancock, 2007). Romani emancipation wasfollowed shortly by renewed persecution during World War II. The Roma Holocaust(Porajmos) in Europe annihilated half of the Roma population in Nazi-occupiedterritories (Hancock, 2007). Romania, which allied with Nazi Germany in 1940,killed and deported thousands of its Romani citizens to Transnistria (Achim, 2004;Crowe, 1999).

After World War II, socialist Romania did not grant its Roma population officialstatus as a national minority, similarly to other Eastern Bloc countries. Many Romawere resettled from rural areas to the “industrial belt” around major cities. Hastilyconstructed apartment buildings contained sections specifically for Romani families,effectively creating Roma ghettos at the periphery of “developing” Romanian cities(Barany, 2000; Crowe, 1999). Nevertheless, although Roma remained “at the bottom ofvirtually all socioeconomic indicators,” socialist policies that promoted full employ-ment, along with the availability of “free education and healthcare, state assistancein housing and child-rearing” did, in fact, result in some improvement in the livingconditions of Romani people in Eastern Europe (Barany, 2000, p. 421). However, withthe dismantling of socialist welfare states after 1989, the situation of Roma in Romaniaand the region rapidly deteriorated, with levels of poverty, unemployment, and healthproblems vastly outpacing national averages (Barany, 1998 and 2000).

Economic decline, political turmoil, and national identity anxieties during thepostsocialist period contributed to escalating anti-Roma sentiments and violence inRomania and the region (Crowe, 1999). Scholars and human rights organizationshave repeatedly found widespread, unapologetic “anti-Gypsyism” at all levels ofRomanian society, evidenced in media coverage, political and popular discourse,and violent acts against Roma (e.g., ERRC, 2001; Fox, 2010; Kligman, 2001; Tileaga,2006; Woodcock, 2007). This nearly ubiquitous anti-Gypsyism is connected to theambivalent and unsettled state of Romanian national identity in the aftermath ofcommunism’s collapse.5 Romania’s frustrations related to EU accession and the coun-try’s current bid for admission into the Schengen Area have further fueled nationalfears that “the Gypsies” are ruining the nation’s chances to be seen as truly European.On two occasions—in 1995 and 2010—attempts were made to designate officiallyRoma as Tigani (Gypsies) in all public documents, and to discontinue the use ofRom/Rrom (plural Roma/Rroma) by Romanian state institutions (Rostas, 2010).6 Inboth cases, politicians argued this was necessary because the word Roma soundedtoo much like the name of the country and could damage Romania’s internationalimage. Although the proposals were unsuccessful, they show the existence of an



enduring political discourse in Romania, which frames Romani alterity as an explicitnational goal with important international implications.

The media’s role in magnifying anti-Roma sentiment is also well documented(Imre, 2011; Woodcock, 2007). A 2003 Gallup Poll found that 82% of Romaniansbelieved the vast majority of Roma broke the law, while 65.9% agreed that Romashould not be allowed to travel abroad because they created problems (cited in Tileaga,2006, p. 22). Similar attitudes have underpinned international agreements betweenRomania and several Western European countries, which allow for the repatriation ofRomani migrants back to Romania (Rostas, 2010). The overwhelming political senti-ment on Romani migration was summed up in 2001 by Petre Roman, then Romania’sForeign Minister, who stated that the government had an obligation “to protect 23million Romanians against the few thousand Tigani [Gypsies] who are preventing thecountry from getting off the EU visa blacklist” (quoted in Woodcock, 2007, p. 502).

Discourse practice: Defending the nation through branding

Embracing the global spirit of commercialization and mediatization, Romania hasdeveloped a penchant for deploying government-sponsored branding campaigns to“defend” its national identity against unflattering foreign representations (Bardan& Imre, 2011; Kaneva & Popescu, 2011). A lighthearted expression of commercialdefense tactics is found in a 2009 tourism branding campaign, which pitched Roma-nia as “The Land of Choice.” Campaign commercials featured Romanian sportscelebrities, delivering tongue-in-cheek lines. In one spot, gymnast Nadia Comanecitells viewers that Romania is “the only country in the world where women have thelegal right to marry four men at the same time.” Tennis player Ilie Nastase adds thatRomania is “the country where people are riding zebras,” and soccer star GheorgheHagi invites visitors to “come to Romania and taste the fish fruit.” Following theseoutlandish statements, a voiceover gently mocks the viewer: “You know nothingabout Romania, do you? Time to come and discover it.”7

A much more sinister manifestation of the same obsession with dispelling for-eigners’ ignorance about Romania—and especially their presumed inability to tellapart “real” Romanians from Roma—is observed in a poster campaign by extremeright-wing organization Noua Dreapta [New Right]. Launched in November 2007,only days after the highly publicized murder of an Italian woman in Rome, allegedlycommitted by a Romanian Rom, the campaign aimed to “impose a correct image ofRomania in Europe” and eliminate any “confusion between ‘Roma’ and Romanians”(Noua Dreapta, 2007). The same criminal incident also led to official reactions bythe Romanian government, including the 2008 “Romanians in Europe” campaign weanalyze in this article.

One poster, disseminated by Noua Dreapta, displays two photos of “Roma” and“Romanians” side by side. The “Roma” photo, on the left, features two men, fivewomen of varying ages but visibly younger than the men, and a baby. All are standingor squatting next to a wire fence, behind which a low-cost, concrete apartment



building is observed. All are dressed in brightly colored, garish clothing; the menwear hats and all but one of the women wear headscarves. Their skin is visibly darkerthan the skin of “Romanians” in the other photo. By contrast, a “Romanian” family offive—father, mother, two boys, and a girl—is seated against a blue studio background,facing the camera directly and smiling cheerfully. All are dressed in white shirts andblue jeans. Not only do they have fair complexions, but they are also all blond.

The verbal message of the poster (in Italian) is quite direct. Above the two photoswe see in block capitals: “Notice the difference!” A black arrow points to the leftphoto and under it we read: “Gypsies (Rom),” printed in black. An arrow under theright photo is colored in yellow, blue, and red (the colors of the Romanian flag) andthe word underneath reads “Romanians.” A sentence combines these symbolicallycolored labels and reads: “Gypsies (Rom) and Romanians are two different peoples!”8

The racialized construction of Romani alterity in this poster is unambiguous. Racismhas often remained in the “blind spot” of discussions about national identity inpostsocialist Europe (Imre, 2011), but its presence is hard to miss here. As we willshow later in the article, a racialized identity discourse also appears in the texts of thestate-sanctioned branding campaign “Romanians in Europe.”

Even before formal EU accession in 2007, Italy and Spain became primary desti-nations for Romanian migrants who were the largest foreign resident communitiesin those countries by 2008 (Herm, 2008). Increased visibility of new migrants, pairedwith negative media coverage, contributed to growing anti-immigrant sentimentsin both countries (Checa-Olmos & Arjona-Garrido, 2011; Sigona, 2008). Italianmedia were especially galvanized when, on October 30, 2007, Giovanna Reggiani,a 47-year-old Italian woman, was brutally beaten in a side alley in Rome and diedof her injuries 2 days later. The man arrested for the crime was Nicolae RomulusMailat, a young Romanian Rom, who, according to his neighbors in a nearby shacksettlement, was mentally disturbed (as reported in The Economist, 2007). Fox (2010,p. 5) poignantly observes that had it not been for “the [Romanian] citizenship andRoma/gypsy [stet.] ‘ethnicity’ of the perpetrator” the media might have treated this asa “banal crime” story and not given it much attention. However, once the perpetratorwas labeled as a Romanian Rom, moral outrage ensued (Fox, 2010). Violent attackson Romanians (both Roma and non-Roma) were committed; Roma encampmentswere burned and bulldozed; Romano Prodi’s cabinet declared a “nomad emergency”[emergenza nomadi] and issued a decree, which permitted the expulsion of EUcitizens considered to be dangerous with only a judge’s order (Sigona, 2008). Italy’s“nomad emergency” became the focus of local electoral battles and was used to justifythe introduction of various harsh policies targeting Roma, which further deterioratedtheir conditions (ERRC, 2008; Sigona, 2008). Amidst the anti-immigrant frenzy,Silvio Berlusconi ran a successful election campaign on the promise of severe actionsagainst “Roma, clandestine immigrants and criminals” (quoted in Walker, 2008).

In the face of escalating media and political rhetoric, the Romanian governmentfelt compelled to respond. On November 4, 2007, Romanian President Basescuappealed to Italian politicians to refrain from incendiary statements, stating: “We



support any criminal being punished but we can’t agree with the humiliation ofRomanians” (quoted in Sigona, 2008, p. 9). A series of high-level meetings betweenthe two countries’ prime ministers followed, resulting in an agreement that Romaniawould send police officers to Italy as part of a joint police force. In addition, theprime ministers issued a joint appeal to the EU asking for more funds to deal with,what they described as, “the most problematic phenomena, like the migration flowsinvolving the Roma ethnic group” (quoted in The Economist, 2007).

Romania’s response included the coordinated nation branding campaign“Romanians in Europe,” which ran in Italy and Spain from September throughNovember 2008, approximately a year after the criminal incident in Rome. Anti-Romarhetoric was continuing in both Italian and Romanian media (Fox, 2010) and thecampaign’s official goal was to provide “alternative information to the negative mediadiscourse generated by the offending acts of some Romanian citizens” (Saatchi& Saatchi PR, n.d.). Oana Marinescu, Director General for Public Diplomacy atRomania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that the Italian campaign aimed to:“show to the Italian public opinion that Romanians and Romania mean much morethan criminality” (Povoledo, 2008).

The government body in charge of coordinating Romania’s response to its “imagecrisis” was the Agency for Governmental Strategies (AGS). The AGS commissionedopinion polls in Italy and Spain—conducted in April and May 2008—which showedpredominantly negative opinions toward immigrants and Romanians in particular(Povoledo, 2008; Saatchi & Saatchi PR, n.d.). This research was used as the basis foran integrated branding campaign, executed by two different advertising agencies. Ital-ian brand consultancy Playteam, based in Milan, handled the Italian version titled,“Romania. Piacere di conoscerti.” [Romania. Pleased to meet you.], which cost Roma-nian taxpayers €4.2 million. The campaign in Spain was executed by Bucharest-basedSaatchi & Saatchi PR. The Spanish campaign used the headline “Hola! Soy Rumano.”[Hi! I’m Romanian.], and its total cost was €3.5 million (Popescu & Corbos, 2010).

From a PR point of view, the campaign was a success—it generated significantmedia coverage in Italian, Spanish, and Romanian media (Saatchi & Saatchi PR, n.d.)and even received a mention in The New York Times (see Povoledo, 2008). The AGSreported that postcampaign studies found a 24% increase in the number of Italianswho held positive attitudes toward immigrants, compared with precampaign polls; inSpain, the number of respondents who held “bad or very bad” opinions about Roma-nians had decreased by 10% (cited in Front News, 2009). For its work on “Hola! SoyRumano,” Saatchi & Saatchi PR won a gold prize in the community relations categoryof the prestigious, international Sabre Awards competition (Tabacu, 2009); it also gar-nered a silver award for excellence at Romanian PR Award, the country’s main PRindustry competition (Saatchi & Saatchi PR, n.d.). “Romanians in Europe” is cited asan example of a successful nation branding initiative in at least one Romanian publicrelations textbook (see Cmeciu, 2010).

Although this study does not include a systematic reception analysis, we encoun-tered many highly skeptical and negative comments about the Italian and Spanish



campaigns in various online forums. In addition, both campaigns inspired videoand poster parodies of their messages. This suggests a much more qualified level of“success” among Italian and Spanish audiences than the one reported by the AGS.Industry awards are also dubious markers of success because they are commonlyused to edify branders’ expert status and drum up new business. Most importantly,standard industry measurements of campaign “effectiveness” say nothing aboutthe ways in which campaign texts reconstruct long-standing discourses of Romanialterity and reproduce intra- and international power relations.

A look at the finances of “Romanians in Europe” provides important clues aboutthe campaign’s significance in Romania’s political context. At a combined cost of €7.7million, this 3-month-long initiative represents the largest, single-campaign invest-ment in nation branding from Romania’s state budget to date. To put this in perspec-tive, consider that Romania’s budget for tourism promotion (also billed as a nationbranding effort) for the entire 2007–2013 period was €75 million (i.e., €15 million peryear, on average), most of which came from EU structural funds rather than the statebudget (Badicioiu & Popan, 2007). Importantly, tourism promotion targets audiencesin more than two European countries.

A few other numbers shed additional light on Romania’s political priorities in allo-cating state funds. A 2010 report by Romania’s National Agency for Roma (NAR)documents that from 1999 to 2010 Romania allocated a total of €157.3 million (i.e.,€14.3 million per year, on average) for policies related to Roma integration, focus-ing on such areas as reducing poverty, improving education, and healthcare. Onlyabout 12% of that money (€16.3 million or €1.48 million per year, on average) camefrom the state budget; the rest came from pre- and post-accession EU funds. Since2007, as a full EU member, Romania is eligible for a large pool of resources from theEuropean Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF),both of which can fund minority-oriented programs. According to one journalisticreport, between 2007 and 2010 the country spent a mere €30 million from EU fundson Roma integration programs (Craciun & Dan, 2010). In 2010, Romania was criti-cized by Laszlo Andor, EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, for itspoor use of EU funds to integrate its Roma population (Vandystadt, 2010). Spend-ing on Roma-related projects has since increased, but allegations of corruption andmisuse of funds continue to put into question the real benefits to Romani communi-ties (see Mogos, 2011). In light of all this, the cost of the 3-month-long “Romanians inEurope” campaign—financed entirely from the state budget—is particularly striking.It suggests the presence of a strong political will to use nation branding as a weaponto “defend” the nation, regardless of the hefty price tag. Other expenditures, however,do not reveal a similar urgent drive to use the state’s resources for including Romainto a shared national vision.



Texts: Who are the “Romanians in Europe”?

How, then, is a vision of Romanianness constructed in the commercial texts of “Roma-nians in Europe”? And what is the position allotted to Romania’s Roma in that vision?Stated differently, what does the branded defense of Romanian national identity looklike? Despite variations in slogans, logos, and visual executions, the campaigns in Italyand Spain adopt a similar format. Both use wide-reaching print and television adver-tisements in the style of “mini documentaries” that portray Romanian immigrantsliving, working, and successfully integrating in Italy and Spain. The immigrants areshown together with “local” people in the context of their work environment. Thevisuals are bright and colorful; the people in the photographs and videos are perpet-ually smiling.

In the Spanish advertisements, actors representing Romanians and Spaniards areshown together, interacting comfortably with each other. However, only the Spanishcharacters are given speaking parts. Facing the camera, they “testify” about their pos-itive experiences with Romanians they know and work with. A doctor praises Ana, aRomanian paramedic, for her “excellent” skills and notes they have trained ambulanceteams together for years. A hotel owner praises Florin, his Romanian hotel manager of4 years, for showing him how much “Romanians value hospitality.” A rancher praisesthe “trustworthy” Romanian couple, Liliana and George, who have taken care of hishorses for over 10 years. Each ad ends with the slogan: “Together we make a greatteam.” [Juntos hacemos un gran equipo]. Notably, the immigrants in each vignettehave arrived in Spain prior to Romania’s EU accession, which would imply that these“model” Romanians may have been working illegally—an issue that remains unex-plored. The commercials also elide the influx of new migrants since 2007. AlthoughRomanians are depicted as competent workers and good “partners,” they are nevergiven a voice. In addition, they occupy professional positions as supporting or servicepersonnel, subordinate to their Spanish superiors; that is, they are presented as helpfuland nonthreatening.

In contrast to the Spanish commercials, the Italian campaign features actualRomanians living in Italy (Mistreanu, 2008). The advertisements show successfulRomanians telling their own stories in fluent Italian. In four television spots, theaudience meets Ioana and Sorin, two restaurant cooks who are engaged to be married,entrepreneur Dimitru, who runs an exercise gym, Ionela, a nurse, and Nelu, an artist.Additional Romanians are introduced in print advertisements and in a 30-minutedocumentary in which an Italian journalist travels on a bus to several locations tomeet Romanians living in Italy. Among them, we encounter Bogdan, a gardener,Ionut, a butcher who used to be a DJ in Romania, Maria, a theater director, andGabriel, an electrician. In the videos, the immigrants talk about how they decided tomigrate to Italy and the life they have made for themselves there. The advertisementsuse the slogan, “To understand a nation you must know its people” [Per capire unpopolo devi conoscere la sua gente]. This phrase invites Italians to acquaint themselves



with the “real” Romanians living among them and, by implication, avoid falling backon stereotypical generalizations about the entire Romanian nation.

Overall, the Italian campaign offers a wider variety of characters than the Span-ish one. Another important distinction is that it allows Romanians to speak forthemselves—at least in the television advertisements and the documentary. Theirvoice is taken away in the print advertisements, whose copy is written in the thirdperson, with brief biographical information about the individual being profiledunderneath a smiling photo of that person posing together with Italian friends. Theoccupations featured are also interesting as they portray many of the Romaniansas enterprising individuals: Ionut owns his own butcher shop; Dimitru runs hisown gym; Bogdan the gardener has a VAT number and works as an independentcontractor; and Nelu and Maria are artists who pursue their personal creative visions.This is a rather different approach from the one adopted in the Spanish campaign.Although Romanian immigrants are portrayed as hardworking and honest in bothcampaigns, the Italian commercials place an emphasis on their self-sufficiency andentrepreneurialism, whereas the Spanish version highlights their subordinate statusin professional hierarchies. It is difficult to know what accounts for this difference.However, it is noteworthy that the Italian campaign—which portrays Romanians asactive, self-sufficient agents—was produced by an Italian agency, while the Spanishcampaign—which portrays Romanians as subordinate to Spaniards—was producedby a Romanian agency. It is tempting to see in the latter example the narratives of“self-colonization” (Kiossev, n.d.) that have been internalized by Romanian branders.In this view, the Spanish campaign texts reproduce an orientalist discourse thatpositions Romanian immigrants as “lesser than” the “Westerners” whose acceptanceand approval they seek.

The choice of professions featured in both campaigns is also interesting in lightof actual occupational statistics, which show that a combined 67% of Romanianimmigrants in Europe between 1990 and 2006 were employed in construction,agriculture, and housekeeping (Sandu et al., 2006. p. 35). Thus, notwithstanding their“documentary” format, the commercials are hardly representative of the situationof Romanian migrants in Italy and Spain. Rather, they depict an imaginary “modelRomanian”—despite the use of real people in the Italian advertisements. This modelRomanian is custom-designed to be the opposite of “the other” Romanian—criminal,vagrant, threatening, and frequently of Romani ethnicity—who emerges from sen-sationalized, politicized, and racialized media coverage in Italy, Spain, and Romania.Thus, to negate the otherness of the model Romanian, the branding messages mustexorcize any reference to Romania’s Roma from their portrait. This is how thedynamic of hierarchical othering is reproduced.

The branders’ strategic attempt to purge the Roma from their construction ofRomanianness is illustrated most clearly in one component of the Italian campaign,called “Casa Romania,” which involved a traveling pavilion that represented “a replicaof an urban dwelling in contemporary Romania,” as well as an interactive online ver-sion (Mistreanu, 2008). The pavilion was set up in public squares in Milan and Rome



in November 2008 (Povoledo, 2008), while the virtual “Casa Romania” was part ofthe Italian campaign’s website, which also featured the television commercials, printadvertisements, and a 30-minute documentary produced for the campaign.

What is most striking about “Casa Romania”—in both its physical and virtualmanifestations—is its literal whiteness. White walls, a white couch, white tables,chairs, and bookcases, a white television set, a white stereo, and a white, blondehostess, wearing a white shirt. There is hardly anything “typical” about this home,which poses as a “typical” Romanian apartment. In this whitewashed, sanitized visionof the “model Romanian’s home,” there is no room for color—literal or metaphorical;it is the complete opposite of mediated images of squalid Romani camps and theirdark-skinned inhabitants. In its visual use of white, “Casa Romania” is eerily reminis-cent of the Noua Dreapta poster discussed earlier. It also reveals that “color”—thatis, the racialization of identity—is a central, although seldom discussed, aspect ofEurope’s hierarchy of othering. In summary, the branded construction of a “modelRomanian”—hardworking, honest, friendly and, most of all, white—can only berealized through an implicit comparison to an already familiar, abrogated Romanisubject—vagrant, thieving, threatening, and dark-skinned.

The complete absence of Romani people from both campaigns, despite their cre-ators’ stated goals of correcting media distortions of reality, constitutes another strate-gic distortion, emanating from the conflicting interests of nationalist politics of exclu-sion and an EU-mandated rhetoric of openness and inclusiveness. The strategy ofexcluding Roma from the branded portrait of Romanians in Italy and Spain did notelude some media observers and antidiscrimination activists. An online column forthe news channel France24 wryly commented:

It’s easy to work out what the Romanian government is doing. [… ] It’s true thatpeople all over confuse Roma and Romanians; if all Roma people from Romaniaare Romanian, then all Romanians are Roma. The government can neither saythat Roma people are not Romanian, nor that all Romanians, Roma included, arerespectable… so they are saying that “most Romanian citizens are respectable.”What that means, is that some Romanian citizens are not respectable—searchthem out! (Dacheux & Campinez, 2008)

While the columnists’ point is well taken, there is much more at stake in the campaignsthan an effort to correct a case of “confused” identity. What we hope to have shown isthat this branded construction of alterity, as well as the sociopolitical dynamics thatled to the campaign’s appearance, are motivated by historically entrenched discoursesof othering within and across national borders, which endure in Europe today despitethe EU rhetoric of inclusion. Romania’s nation branding effort in Italy and Spain doesnot change these underlying dynamics; rather, it replays them in a marketing regis-ter, in tune with contemporary conditions of increased migration, marketization, andmediatizaiton.



Conclusions: Mutations of othering and nationalism

Through our analysis of nation branding in this case, we have documented onespecific instance of the mediatization and marketization of long-standing, layeredhierarchies of othering. In our reading, the “Romanians in Europe” campaign exerteda form of state-sanctioned “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, 1990) over Romania’sRomani citizens abroad, erasing them from the branded narrative of a Romaniannational identity, while seeking to prevent the othering of non-Roma Romaniansby Western Europeans. Bourdieu uses the concept of symbolic violence to refer toeveryday, taken-for-granted practices that are “misrecognized” as moral obligationsor emotional attachments, which therefore simultaneously conceal the reenactmentof relations of domination (1990, p. 126–127). In the case of “Romanians in Europe,”the justifications for the campaign and its textual executions misrecognized nationaland transnational racism, disavowal, and domination over Roma as legitimate con-cerns about Romania’s international reputation and for its non-Roma immigrants, aswell as empathy with the Italian and Spanish nations. Campaign texts appealed toemotional attachments and similarities among Italians, Spaniards, and Romanians,while symbolically obliterating Romanian Roma from their narratives of identity.

At the same time, the campaign’s construction of a “model Romanian” identitydepended on the implied presence of a nullified Romani subject—a silent, dark otherwithout whom a nonthreatening, white Romanian subject would not be possible inthe European context. Among other things, the self-sufficient “model Romanians”in campaign texts are marked as “Western” or “European” through their embrace ofindividualism and free market entrepreneurialism. Despite their modest beginnings,they need no handouts from the state (any state) as they fearlessly and good-naturedlynavigate the economic and cultural “flows” of EU expansion and globalization. Atthe same time, they appear comfortably apolitical, keeping their “dreams” to simplepleasures such as food, friends, family, and the occasional artistic escapade.

In this context, Europe’s “Roma problem” acquires a new significance and, inour view, requires new policy approaches. It is beyond the purview of this studyto offer policy prescriptions, but it should be noted that much of the EU’s currentefforts at “Roma integration” are predicated on a top-down approach, which iden-tifies areas of “intervention” and then relies on national governments to devise andimplement intervention strategies, as well as to disburse EU funds. This arrangementis particularly problematic because, as Simhandl (2006, p. 110) suggests, the EU’spolicy discourse overwhelmingly conceives of Roma “merely as political objects,”denying them voice and agency. This is compounded by the actions of national-ist politicians who seek to “evade their own national responsibility for their owncitizens by arguing that the European institutions have a special responsibilitytoward the Roma” (Sigona & Vermeersch, 2012, p. 1190). In this study, we haveillustrated one such instance of efforts to “evade” responsibility by the Romaniangovernment, which decided that an expensive, mass-mediated, public disavowal of



the country’s Romani migrants is more politically expedient, both domestically andinternationally.

This case study also carries implications for the changing nature of nationhoodin the post-Cold War European context. Our analysis confirms previous theoreticalclaims that orientalism in the EU context is being decoupled from place and suggeststhat new forms of othering have emerged with the help of commercialized mediadiscourses. In addition, it appears that EU expansion to the East has added onemore layer onto the hierarchy of exclusion within the continent. In other words,calls for a transnational European identity that transcends ingrained East/Westdivisions may have brought to the fore a more pressing need to find “non-European”others within Europe (e.g., Romani or Muslim). This is a disturbing proposition,yet one that may explain the collusion between national governments (as in thecase of Italy and Romania) to exercise highly discriminatory measures towardRoma, despite putative endorsements of the EU’s official rhetoric of inclusion andequality.

Finally, in showing how a nation branding campaign was used as a strategictool to police the boundaries of national and transnational identities, we havesought to unsettle notions that a postmodern, image-conscious, “soft power”nationalism—exemplified by the practices and discourses of nation branding—issomehow less dangerous or “more humane” than its modernist manifestations onthe European continent (e.g., Anholt, 2006; van Ham, 2001). Rather, we see thismediatized, marketized mutation of nationalism as a logical, yet no less damaging,adaptation, born from the articulation of nationalist ideologies with acceleratedcapitalist globalization and European expansion after the end of the Cold War.

Notes

1 A 2009 survey found that “1 in 5 Roma respondents were victims of racially motivatedpersonal crime—including assaults, threats, and serious harassment—at least once in theprevious 12 months” (EU-MIDIS, 2009, p. 3).

2 We use quotation marks for “the Roma problem” throughout the text to underscore theideological baggage of the phrase; it is not merely a neutral term.

3 Nation branding activities range from the use of national logos and slogans to setting upgovernmental and quasi-governmental entities that develop long-term national brandstrategies (see Kaneva, 2011a).

4 Todorova criticizes the concept of “nesting orientalism” for treating “the discourseinvolving the Balkans as a variation of orientalism” (1997, p. 10). However, we find itvaluable because it moves us beyond the limitations of macro analyses that understandbalkanism or orientalism only as “total” discourses.

5 Elsewhere, we have drawn attention to the national identity crisis in postsocialistRomania, exemplified forcefully by the Romanian national flag with a hole cut out inplace of the communist coat of arms. This “emptied” flag became an iconic symbol ofRomania’s 1989 revolution (Kaneva & Popescu, 2011, p. 194).



6 The silent second “r” in the Romanian spelling of Rrom/Rroma was officially introducedin 2000, in response to concerns about phonetic similarities to Romanian (Român)(Woodcock, 2007, p. 504).

7 The spot can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y-3lAYi7Vg (accessedAugust 17, 2012).

8 The poster can be viewed online athttp://www.nouadreapta.org/actiuni_prezentare.php?idx=171 (accessed August 12,2012).

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"We are Romanian, not Roma": Nation Branding and Postsocialist Discourses of Alterity

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