Legacy of Two Crowns: Romanians and Vlachs

Abstract

The Romanian community living in the post-post Yugoslav Republic of Serbia presents the particularity of being split between two groups self-naming themselves with different yet equivalent names: Romanians and Vlachs. Their different modernization experiences explain this particularity of self-identification. The two cases confirm the thesis that the modern nation is a construct, a build community while the primordial elements of identity, the ethnicity, the similarity of spoken idioms, and (in some cases) the confessional particularity, does not evolve into a modern national identity without the action of an agent. The role of the state is crucial: depending on its agenda it may foster or block the group’s emancipation and identity conservation efforts. Assimilation programs may have different results depending on the general development degree of the cultural-ethnic community - modernized communities, with strong intelligentsia and bourgeoisie are able to resist successfully to strong pressure and repressive acts, while less modernized, traditional communities are more easily assimilated.