Abstract:
This paper focuses on a chronology of events presented by the Romanian media,
especially newspapers with national coverage and impact like Gândul and Adevărul,
between the first week of June to the first week of September 2015, when the issue of
having a mosque erected in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, was intensely debated
by intellectuals, politicians, and religious professionals. The debates were intensely heated
from the onset of these events and most of them revealed that most of the participants were
driven by anti-Muslim attitudes, xenophobia, and assertive nationalism, a complex of
feelings that I called “negative ecodomy”. The concept of “negative ecodomy”
presupposes an attempt to built a safe environment, in this case for Romanians in their own
country, but the adjective “negative” was added to the the positive idea of “ecodomy”
because these efforts to offer a safe context for Romanians were accompanied by the
negativity of anti-Muslim, xenophobic, and nationalistic activities. This array of negative
ecodomic attitudes were displayed by Romanians not only in online media but also in the
street through protests and other similar actions in a country which has been a member of
the European Union for almost a decade and was supposed to adhere to the European Union’s basic principles of multiculturalism and the free circulation of persons. The
totality of these events show that Romanians are still rather far from accepting the
European Union’s fundamental philosophy or perhaps these principles themselves should
be reconsidered and reinterpreted in the context of the massive Middle Eastern and African
immigration and the constant, if not increasing threat of Islamic terrorism.
Description:
This article is part of a two-year postdoctoral research program (2015–2017) at the Faculty of
Theology, the Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics, University of Pretoria, under the
supervision of Johan Buitendag.
