Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

“The California of the Romanians”9 of the 1866 Constitution of Romania, which favored the granting ofRomanian citizenship to ethnic Romanians from abroad without a naturalizationstage.The 1882 Property Law was modified in 1884, 1885, 1889, 1893, andwas finally supplemented with the “Interpretative Law” on 10 April 1910.These modifications highlighted the specific interests of the state in the colonizationprocess, namely: 1) to assure a constant source of income for thestate budget, by selling land to colonists; 53 and 2) to implement an effectivecolonization of Dobrogea with ethnic Romanians. To this end, the Romanianstate established a strict monopoly on land circulation in Dobrogea.Thus, the law of March 1909 enabled the state to buy 1,012 hectares of landfrom the Dobrogean Russians who chose to emigrate to Siberia. The 1910“Interpretative Law” also granted the state the right to annul any land transactionbetween a colonist and a third party, which was not supervised by theRomanian state. 54 Overall, during the period 1889-1912, the state confiscated127,483 hectares of land from the native Dobrogeans who failed toredeem their tithe, and from the colonists who failed to pay their installmentsor to relocate into the province. In the period 1889-1914, 82,127hectares of this total land were redistributed to ethnic Romanian colonists,in order to strengthen the Romanian character of the province. 552.5 THE FRONTIER ECONOMY: ETHNIC COLONIZATIONIN NORTHERN DOBROGEADobrogea’s frontier economy attracted very early pan-Romanian immigration,as the province entered “within the radius of the Romanianexpansion.” 56 This trend was reinforced by the 1880 law, which favoreda massive Romanian colonization of Dobrogea. This colonizationoccurred in several waves: 1884-1891, 1893-1897, 1904-1907 and 1912-1914. 57 As a result, Dobrogea became “a Dacia in miniature,” or “a mosaicof Romanian races.” 58 Together with autochthonous Romanians inDobrogea, several other categories of Romanians settled in the province,originating from Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia and Bessarabia, andvarious Balkan regions (Vlachs from Pind and the Timoc Valley, etc.).This immigration had profound social consequences for Romanian society,creating new social identities and political loyalties. Dobrogea becamea melting pot of regional differences and a laboratory for fostering Romaniannational identity.Under the impact of state-sponsored ethnic colonization, the overallpopulation of the province saw a dramatic increase: from approximately100,000 inhabitants in 1878, to 261,490 in 1900, and 368,189 inhabitants in1912. 59 Although Northern Dobrogea remained an ethnic mosaic, 60 ethnic135