In this article, I will analyse how Romanian Presidents and Prime Ministers
from 2004 to 2014 discussed the right to free movement in terms of the Romanian
state and identity. The Romanian statements were collected from the official
website of the President of Romania, from the Prime Minister’s website as well
from the archives of the Romanian Government. I have divided the arguments into
duty-based and result-based moral approaches to free movement, while focusing
especially on identity-related questions of free movement. The analysis reveals
that the right to free movement was discussed in connection with the Romanian
community, and the same right should apply to Moldovan citizens, who are of the
same ethnic origin and have the same official language. Romania has also
granted Romanian citizenship for many Moldovans, thus granting them the right
to free movement in the European Union. I will first introduce the material and
the theoretical framework used in the analysis, and present the background of
my doctoral dissertation from which the results have been drawn. The empirical
part of the article will be divided in two parts, the former considering the duty-based
community feelings between Romanians and Moldovans in terms of free movement, while
the latter discusses solidarity-related comments about free movement. Finally,
I will draw my conclusions relying on the sections concerning kinship-based questions
related to free movement in the Romanian discourse. I will argue that there was
not much kinship felt towards the European Union in the free movement discourse,
but Romania and Moldova were considered to consist of the same people, and free
movement should thus be granted to Moldovans, too. To a certain extent, this
has also occurred in granting the citizenship to many Moldovan citizens.