The outcomes of inadequate assimilation of Roma in socialist Romania

Abstract

The paper analyzes the effect of the ‘assimilation’ policies (housing, education, employment, pronatalist) promoted by Ceauşescu’s socialist regime toward the Roma on the extreme degradation of their social and economic status in the transition period which followed. The failure of these policies increased their discrimination and deteriorated the community social ties, locking the Roma in a vicious inter-generational cycle of poverty and exclusion. To support this argument further, an intra-group comparison between a deprived Roma community, Brazilia, which was heavily influenced by the communist ‘assimilation’ policies and a better-off Roma community, Boghiş, which stayed isolated and preserved its ethnic identity was carried out.