Proceedings of The 7th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Interethnic issues of historical Bukovina in interwar period (1918-1939)
Popescu-Cruceanu Alexandrina
ABSTRACT:
In the interwar period, the political and social life in Bukovina was characterized, in general, by the co-habitation and collaboration among different ethnics, facts that determined, sometimes, the apparition of interethnic tensions, worsened – in the ’30 – by the extremist moves. The Austrian domination in Bukovina created a relative material and cultural inequality, between Romanians and minorities. Minorities spoke better German than Romanian people, who, were disfavored in the Austrian period, the majority sharing another religion than orthodoxy, predominated, in number, in the administrative, economical, educational, justice, trade/commerce institutions. Even under these conditions, the ethnic minorities enjoyed the right to appeal to the international public opinion, and the Romanian authorities did not constrain them. In the capital of historical Bukovina, for example, even in the ’30, besides the publications in Romanian, there were a lot of journals and magazines in minorities languages, there were Jewish, German, Ukrainians, Polish theatres. Writers, poets, scientists of non-Romanian citizens wrote and were published also. However, in the interwar period, the issue of ethnic minorities was used by some states as a means of putting pressure on countries that have inside this kind of citizens, and by other states as a way to perpetuate the problem of borders in the center and east of Europe.
keywords: extremism, international law, minorities, titular nation, toleration.