Citizenship, Territoriality, and Post-Soviet Nationhood by Maxim Tabachnik

Author:Maxim Tabachnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030128821
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Law on Civil Status: Ethnicity Loses Its Meaning

The 2012 debate on the changes to the Law of Civil Status is exemplary of the tension between territorial and ethnic concepts of the nation . If Romanianists won the battle over the name of the language, the notion of ethnicity that they had to accept makes absolutely no sense to an ethnic nationalist—it is completely disconnected from one’s descent and chosen by people at random. This was a victory for the territorial concept of the nation.

These changes were precipitated by the 2010 decision by the European Court on Human Rights in the case of Cibotaru v. Moldova . The Court sided with the plaintiff pronouncing against Article 68 of the Law of Civil Status of the Republic of Moldova , which prevented a person from changing his or her ethnic affiliation on birth, divorce, and name change certificates as well as established the inadmissibility of rectification of parents’ nationality on children’s birth documents (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:99).

The Ministry of Justice proposed excluding the notion of nationality from civil status documents. In Azerbaijan and Georgia , this had already been done, easily in the case of the former and with great pains in the case of the latter. The Moldovan case fell between these two popular reactions.

In the draft of the new law, the Ministry of Justice agreed to make an exception for the birth certificate permitting to register ethnicity either by the person himself or herself upon reaching 16 years of age or by the request of the parents. This solution was seen as a way to end the imposition of nationality on a person who may disagree with it “objectively or subjectively.” The project argued for the elimination of the notion of nationality altogether due to its confusion with citizenship and replacing it with the notion of ethnic self-identification, which was supported by the Council of Europe (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:99). While the European Court of Justice did not pronounce against the usage of the notion of nationality, the proposed changes argued for it with the aim to getting Moldovan law in line with the legislation of other European states, which understands nationality as citizenship (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:101).

The proponents of the changes further argued that an ethnic group can be formed at any time and, therefore, there is no exhaustive list of ethnic groups in existence. A sarcastic critic of the changes asked, “If anyone could declare belonging to any ethnic group, could one declare himself or herself as a member of the extraterrestrial ethnic group?” (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:101–102). As an opponent MP eventually admitted the existence of a list of ethnic groups on “international level”(Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:103), another critical MP was worried that a child of Moldovan parents would decide to identify as German upon reaching 16 years old (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:105). Deputies had a particular problem with the notion that ethnicity could be selected without taking into consideration that of the parents (Minutes of Parliamentary Debates 2011:106).

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