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This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library] On: 20 December 2014, At: 08:16 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjcs20 Marking time in the middle ground: Contested identities and Moldovan foreign policy Charles King a a School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Georgetown University Published online: 12 Aug 2006. To cite this article: Charles King (2003) Marking time in the middle ground: Contested identities and Moldovan foreign policy, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 19:3, 60-82, DOI: 10.1080/13523270300660018 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523270300660018 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Marking time in the middle ground: Contested identities and Moldovan foreign policy

This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 20 December 2014, At: 08:16Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Communist Studies andTransition PoliticsPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjcs20

Marking time in the middle ground:Contested identities and Moldovanforeign policyCharles King aa School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government,Georgetown UniversityPublished online: 12 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Charles King (2003) Marking time in the middle ground: Contested identitiesand Moldovan foreign policy, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 19:3, 60-82, DOI:10.1080/13523270300660018

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523270300660018

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, ouragents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to theaccuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions andviews expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are notthe views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not berelied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylorand Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs,expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply,or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Marking time in the middle ground: Contested identities and Moldovan foreign policy

Marking Time in the Middle Ground:Contested Identities and Moldovan

Foreign Policy

CHARLES KING

At every turn, the Moldovans have behaved in ways that have confoundedmost observers. Moldova was a Soviet republic that had never existed asan independent state within its present borders. It nevertheless producedone of the most vocal national movements of the perestroika period – amovement that would eventually lead the republic towards fullindependence. During the Soviet years, the Moldovans seemed to acceptthe Soviet system; the republic remained a generally quiet backwaterwhere rates of linguistic assimilation to Russian and ethnic intermarriagewere among the highest in the union. Yet in the 1990s, Moldova suffereda divisive and violent conflict between majority and minority populationsand between political elites supporting independence and those intent onmaintaining the unity of the Soviet Union.

Western analysts had long treated the idea of a distinct Moldovanidentity as little more than an artificial creation of Soviet propaganda,designed primarily to buttress Soviet territorial acquisitions during theSecond World War and serve as a brake on potential Romanianirredentism. The prediction was that the Moldovans, if given the chance,would surely seek to reunite with their former motherland, Romania. Butthis intense and sustained effort to build a distinct Moldovan culture andlanguage – related to but separate from Romanian – produced a strikingresult: while most Moldovans in the late 1980s rejected the idea of anindependent Moldovan language and distinct national identity, they havenot been eager to deny the existence of cultural and historical traditionsthat set them apart from ‘ordinary’ Romanians. Few Moldovans haveshown any great inclination to undo the territorial changes of the SecondWorld War and, in fact, have come to embrace the idea of an independentMoldovan state, if not an independent Moldovan nation.

Moldova is thus a particularly promising venue in which to study thepolitics of identity, especially its effects on the external relations of the

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state. Moldova was the only Soviet republic whose core nationality shareda potential national identity with a population beyond the borders of theSoviet Union, and it remains the only Soviet successor state whose titularpopulation is divided over the essentials of its own history and culture. Itis undeniable that the tenuous historical claims to nationhood amongMoldova’s majority population, and the domestic political disputes thathave sprung from them, have played an important role in conditioning theforeign policy of the post-Soviet government. The twists and turns ofMoldovan foreign policy since 1991 have in part been a product of thedomestic political disputes in Chișinău, disputes that in turn have resultedfrom fundamental divisions over identity and national destiny. This articleassesses the debates over ‘Moldovanness’ since the late 1980s and linksthese debates with the development of relations towards Romania, Russia,and Europe.

Cine Sîntem: Who Are We?

The ethnic provenance of the largest population in the Republic ofMoldova – a little under two-thirds of the total – has never beenstraightforward. The official Soviet position, expounded in innumerableworks in linguistics and historiography after the 1920s, was that theMoldovans formed a distinct historical nation. While related to theRomanians, the Moldovans were nevertheless held to be a separate peoplewith their own customs, traditions and, most importantly, language.According to Soviet scholars, the Moldovans had emerged as a result ofthe ‘cultural symbiosis’ of two groups: the indigenous tribes of theCarpathians and the region between the Prut and Dnestr rivers, romanizedduring the period of Roman occupation in the second and third centuriesAD, and the Slavs, who arrived in the region in the sixth and seventhcenturies. On this cultural substrate, centuries of interaction between theRomance-speaking population and local Slavs had formed a distinctnation whose right to self-determination would eventually be realizedthrough the liberating policies of Soviet socialism.1

The territory that the Soviets ‘liberated’ was Bessarabia, a formertsarist guberniya that had joined Romania in the border changes of 1918.Throughout the interwar period, the status of Bessarabia remained indispute. Bucharest contended that the region, populated in the main byRomanian-speakers, was a rightful part of the enlarged Romaniankingdom that emerged from the postwar peace settlements; as withBukovina, Transylvania and the other territories that joined Greater

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Romania, a popular representative assembly in Chișinău hadvoted for the union in March 1918.2 The Soviet authorities, though,maintained that the ‘Romanian-speakers’ were in fact a distinctpeople, the Moldovans, whose ethnic identity was being erased byBucharest; propaganda concerning the ‘Romanianness’ of Bessarabia,and educational policies designed to ‘romanize’ the Bessarabiancountryside, were the chief tools that Romania’s ‘landlord-capitalists’were using against the Moldovan peasant. Acting on the basis of thesearguments and the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the SovietUnion annexed Bessarabia in June 1940 and transformed it into a newMoldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, a distinct political entityrepresenting what the Soviet authorities considered to be a distinctMoldovan nation.3

Throughout the remainder of the Soviet period, the official line onMoldovanness remained in place. The period of Romanian ‘occupation’ inBessarabia was universally denounced as an attempt to denationalize theMoldovans, while historians were silent on the deportations and faminethat followed the establishment of Soviet rule.4 The freedoms of theperestroika period, though, allowed such accepted truths and blank spotsto be addressed. Historians began to explore previously forbidden topics,and linguists addressed the prickly question of the relationship betweenMoldovan and Romanian. As most scholars knew, but none had been ableto say, the cultural differences between Moldovans and Romanians wereminuscule; while both peoples had their own peculiarities and historicalexperiences, it was the political slant given to these differences – not themagnitude of those differences themselves – that had long keptMoldovans and Romanians apart. Following public demonstrationsorganized by the reform-oriented Popular Front of Moldova, the republicadopted the Latin script for the language in August 1989, changed its flagto a version of the Romanian tricolour, and eventually declaredindependence in August 1991.5

From the outset, though, the identity question was never as simple asit was portrayed. What seemed a movement in the late 1980s forRomanian national rebirth after decades of Soviet obfuscation was in factan intense and multifaceted debate about the fundamentals ofMoldovanness.6 Even in the late 1990s, individual citizens were dividedon the identity question, with most referring to themselves and theirlanguage as ‘Moldovan’ but an important minority opting for‘Romanian’.7 Why this situation has obtained is in dispute. Three majorschools of thought have emerged to explain it.8

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The first view, advocated by some members of the Popular Front ofMoldova in the late 1980s and eventually taken up by its successor, thecurrent Christian-Democratic People’s Party, was a mirror image of theSoviet version. On this view, the true heritage of the Moldovans, lost inthe mists of Soviet disinformation, is simply Romanian. The only reasonthat Moldovans and Romanians do not today form part of the same stateis that particular political forces in the republic, remnants of the old Sovietsystem, prevent the majority population from attending the historicalvocation of pan-Romanian union. All Moldovans, if given a chance,would undoubtedly recognize and embrace their Romanian heritage. Butso long as political forces in Moldova remain oriented towards Russia,and so long as Russia retains an iron hold on the Moldovan economy, thelogical end of the national movement of the 1980s – union with theRomanian motherland – will not be achieved. We might term this the‘conspiratorial theory’ of Moldovan identity.

A second theory can be called the ‘denationalization theory’. On thisview, supported by the country’s most prominent scholars as well as byimportant political factions of the centre and centre-right, Moldovans arecertainly Romanians, but decades of Soviet cultural policy have had adeleterious effect on Moldovans’ national consciousness. Moldovans havelost touch with their past, and only a sustained effort at nation-building –through education, student exchange schemes with Romania, and closereconomic ties with Bucharest – can expunge the legacies of the Sovietperiod. Contemporary scholars, writers, and politicians are thus in thesame position as their forebears earlier in the twentieth century, the localintellectuals who raised Romanian consciousness in Russian Bessarabiaand paved the way for the province’s union with Romania in 1918.9

A third theory is what might be called the ‘historical theory’ ofMoldovanness. According to this version, many Moldovans continue tothink of themselves as a nation apart simply because, in fact, they are one.Put forward by some Moldovan historians (mainly older scholars whomade their career during the Soviet period), this view is a resurrectedversion of the standard Soviet line on Moldovan history, language andculture.10 On this view, the history of the present Republic of Moldova canbe traced back to the distinct political and cultural identities of theMoldovan lands in the Middle Ages and the Ottoman period (even thoughpresent-day Moldova is not coterminous with the territories of theseearlier political entities). The early Moldovan principality, the creation ofa separate Russian guberniya in Bessarabia, the process of modernizationin the Soviet period, and the creation of an independent state in 1991 have

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all led to the creation of a distinct Moldovan nation. This view has beensupported, at various times and in various forms, by the former Moldovanpresident Mircea Snegur and his successors Petru Lucinschi and VladimirVoronin, as well as by a succession of powerful political groupings sincethe early 1990s: the Agrarian Democratic Party (defunct by the late1990s), the Movement for a Democratic and Prosperous Moldova(defunct), the Socialist-Unity Bloc (also defunct), and the Party ofCommunists of Moldova (the overwhelming winner of the 2001parliamentary elections). It is also the version of Moldovan history taughtin the schools of the ‘Dnestr Moldovan Republic’, the separatist enclaveestablished in 1990 in eastern Moldova.11

Disputes among these three camps were a fixture of public life from1988 through to the first post-Soviet parliamentary elections in 1994, butalready by the late 1990s, the apogee of debates over Moldovan identityhad passed.12 Most Moldovans were consumed with the task of survivingin the country’s uncertain economy, and despite a series of studentdemonstrations focused on identity issues in 1995 and 2002,13 mostcitizens and political parties had come to accept – whether gladly orreluctantly – the notion of an independent Moldovan state. Indeed, in theparliamentary elections of March 1998, the revived communist party(renamed the ‘Party of Communists’ to avoid the ban on the formerCommunist Party of Moldova) emerged as the clear winner, gaining 40seats in the 101-member parliament by appealing to voters discouraged bythe interminable ‘transition’. Three other centrist and rightist blocs, unitedonly in their opposition to the communists, managed to put together ashaky coalition government, but already by mid-1998, these groups werepositioning themselves for the next parliamentary elections, heldprematurely in February 2001. In that contest, the communists gained astartling 71 of the 101 seats and managed to elect their leader, Voronin, aspresident. (A constitutional change had shifted the presidency from apopularly elected position to one filled by a parliamentary vote.)

However, even after the communist ascendancy, the identity questionremained one of the few clear ideological issues that distinguished oneparty from another. In the shifting sands of Moldova’s political landscape,how one answered the question ‘Who are we?’ remained the only realshibboleth of political affiliation among the country’s elites. Although thehigh tide of identity politics seemed to have passed, the lack of definiteparty ideologies meant that identity remained one of the few unambiguousindicators of political preference.

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Foreign Policy Orientations

Where political groupings have stood on the question of Moldovanidentity has in large part also determined their particular orientationtowards major foreign policy questions. On the basis of the identitygroupings sketched above, there are three major foreign policyorientations within Moldova. None of these is the sole domain of a singlepolitical party; but they represent the three primary sets of ideas thatmotivate Moldovan politicians and have helped define the country’sforeign relations since 1991.

Pan-Romanism

The core belief of the Popular Front of Moldova was that Romanians andMoldovans formed a single pan-Romanian nation, whose existence hadsince the 1920s been denied by the treachery of Soviet foreign policy.While this theme was present in the debates over language and culture thatarose in the late 1980s, it was not until 1992 that the Popular Front madepan-Romanism – the commitment to the eventual political union of allRomanians – a fundamental part of its political programme. At its thirdcongress in February 1992, the Front, headed by the former journalistIurie Roșca, adopted a new programme that underlined its pan-Romanianorientation and transformed the group from a ‘political movement’ into agenuine political party, the Christian-Democratic Popular Front(eventually renamed the Christian-Democratic People’s Party). Somegroups, centred upon President Snegur, had already defected from themovement in 1991 to form their own more moderate party, the AgrarianDemocrats. But the radicalization of the Front also prompted furthersplintering of the once-united reform movement, including the defectionof individuals otherwise committed to closer ties between Moldova andRomania.

Since 1992 the Front has remained the primary representative of thepan-Romanian ideal, even if, in the run-up to the 2001 elections, the partyformally abjured the notion of quick political union. Its influence,however, has been muted. The Front’s brief experience in government(under Prime Minister Mircea Druc in 1990 and 1991) proved disastrous.The pan-Romanian sentiments of the prime minister and his associates,particularly the culture minister, Ion Ungureanu, alienated the republic’sminorities and destroyed the powerful coalition that the Front had builtagainst the old communist party. Moreover, the most committed pan-Romanists within the Front (including Druc and Ungureanu, and theprominent poets Leonida Lari and Grigore Vieru) eventually moved to

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Romania, convinced by 1991 and 1992 that the goal of pan-Romanianunion had been lost. Representatives of the Front have never held a majorministerial portfolio under any of the post-Druc prime ministers. In the1994 parliamentary elections, the Front (allied with several smaller pan-Romanist groups) gained 7.5 per cent of the vote, but by the 1998elections it was unable to stand on its own, entering an electoral bloc withthe party of former president Snegur. In 2001 the party emerged with thesmallest number of seats – 11 out of 101 – in the assembly.

Another effect of the Front’s actions in 1992 was the emergence of amore moderate pan-Romanist camp, a group that parted ways with theRoșca-led Front over the question of timing and public relations. WhereasRoșca was concerned with making a commitment to union a basic part ofthe party’s platform, other members of the old Front understood thelessons of the Druc period: that any talk of union would push awayprecisely those groups that the Front needed in order to regain politicalpower. These moderate figures came together under a confusing array ofnames – the Congress of the Intelligentsia, the United DemocraticCongress, the Bloc of Peasants and Intellectuals, and the Party ofDemocratic Forces. By the late 1990s they had eclipsed the Front as themost viable pro-Romanian grouping. In a bizarre twist, after 1998 evenMircea Snegur, once the greatest opponent of the pan-Romanists, hadcome around to the more radical camp, joining the Front in an electoralalliance for the 1998 parliamentary ballot, and then joining the Party ofDemocratic Forces in a governmental alliance against the communist-dominated parliament. But moderation on the Romania question proved tobe a flaccid tool of political mobilization: by the time of the 2001elections, the moderate pan-Romanists had completely disappeared as anorganized political force; some had retreated to their previous professions(as educators and writers), others had given up politics for business.

Since neither the radical nor the moderate pan-Romanists have heldgovernment positions since independence, they have not had a majoreffect on foreign policy making.14 However, in more informal ways, theyhave helped to increase ties with Romania. University professors (some ofthe most ardent supporters of the pan-Romanists) regularly travel backand forth between the two states, engage in collaborative researchprojects, and support student exchange schemes. Younger, Romanian-speaking bureaucrats within the foreign ministry often spent time inBucharest, studying at the Romanian National School of Political Studiesand Public Administration, an institution that became the training-groundfor a new generation of foreign policy professionals. Romanian

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newspapers are still generally unavailable in Moldova, but youngerscholars, officials and policy analysts can easily follow Romanian affairson Romanian television (available in Moldova) or on the Internet. It is thislevel of informal connection between the two states, rather than thespecific foreign policy goals pursued by Chișinău, that ensures that pan-Romanism will remain one important orientation in Moldova’s domesticpolitics and international relations.

Eurasianism

At the other end of the political spectrum are those elites favouringstronger integration with Russia and the Commonwealth of IndependentStates and, at an extreme, the re-establishment of the Soviet Union. Wemight term these elites ‘Eurasianists’, since their views on foreign policybear a strong resemblance to those of similar political figures in Russiaand Ukraine; they do not, however, normally use this term themselves.

From the late 1980s, a strong local opposition movement grew inresponse to the calls for Moldovan-Romanian rebirth issued by thePopular Front. The counter-movement’s strongest supporters generallycame from Transnistria, the strip of land east of the Dnestr river.Transnistria was historically, demographically and economically differentfrom the rest of Moldova. Apart from a three-year period during theSecond World War, the zone had never formed part of a Romanian state.It was populated in the main by Russians and Ukrainians (althoughMoldovans formed the largest single ethnic group). It was an importantcomponent of the Soviet defence industry, with industrial plants supplyingmilitary technology to the Soviet army; the region itself held a largepopulation of active-duty and retired military personnel and their families.

It is not surprising, then, that the area should have become the nucleusof opposition to the assertive national movement in Chișinău. The UnitedCouncil of Work Collectives, which led a series of industrial strikes inopposition to Chișinău’s policies in 1989, eventually became the centre ofthe movement for a separate Transnistrian state, formally established in1990. Since that time, the Transnistrian leadership, headed by the formerplant manager Igor Smirnov, has remained committed, first, toTransnistrian autonomy or even independence from Moldova and, second,to the re-establishment of a political relationship with Russia, eitherwithin a reconstituted Soviet federation or on the model of theRussia–Belarus union.

Since independence, though, Transnistria has not been directlyinvolved in Moldovan domestic politics. In all three post-independence

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parliamentary elections (1994, 1998, 2001), the separatist government didallow some Transnistrians who had managed to take Moldovancitizenship to cross the Prut river and vote at special polling stations, butthis number was never more than a few thousand (out of a totalTransnistrian population of over 500,000). Moldova has remained, sincethe 1992 war, a divided state. But within the Bessarabia region, the areaunder the control of Chișinău, a strong Eurasianist alternative to the pan-Romanism of the Front and the Party of Democratic Forces arose. Themovement was first centred upon the Unitatea-Yedinstvo group, a leftistpolitical movement uniting mainly Russians and Ukrainians opposed tothe language and cultural reforms proposed by the Front in 1989, inparticular official status for the Moldovan-Romanian language. Yedinstvoremained the primary opposition movement through the early 1990s,strongly supporting the ratification of Moldova’s formal entry into the CISin 1993 and gaining 22 per cent of the vote in the 1994 parliamentaryelections.

Yedinstvo had been a largely Russian organization; it was the progenyof the Interfront movement of the late Gorbachev period, the network oflocal organizations opposed to the assertiveness of non-Russian majoritiesin the Baltic states and other parts of the Soviet Union. By 1995, however,another leftist political group emerged to challenge both Yedinstvo and thepan-Romanists. Re-established in 1994, the Party of Communists wasable to steal some of Yedinstvo’s Slav supporters and, unlike Yedinstvo,managed to reach out to non-Slav voters by calling for a return to thesecurity and stability of the past. The communists’ message was anti-reform, not anti-Moldovan, and the party thus managed to reached beyondthe narrow minority base of Yedinstvo. In the 1995 local elections,communists won positions as district council heads and mayorsthroughout the republic and, presaging a similar result in Ukraine, gaineda plurality of seats in the national parliament three years later. One of thelessons of both the 1998 and 2001 parliamentary elections, with the strongshowing by communists, was that Eurasianism, based on the idea of re-establishing a closer relationship with Moscow, did not have anexclusively ethnic character.

Basarabism

Neither the pan-Romanism of the Front nor the Eurasianism of theTransnistrians, Yedinstvo and the Party of Communists has proved to bethe dominant orientation in Moldovan foreign affairs. Instead, mostparties and political figures have, since the early 1990s, settled into a

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foreign policy track that might be called, for lack of a better term‘Basarabism’. This orientation seeks to define Moldova’s place as adistinct cultural and political space, a region – like the former Bessarabiaprovince (‘Basarabia’, in Romanian) – whose traditions and interestsderive both from its position as a small region surrounded by largeneighbours and from the overlapping identities of its multi-ethnicpopulation. Codified in the country’s ‘foreign policy concept’ adopted inFebruary 1995,15 the main tenets of this orientation are as follows:

1. Moldova is an independent and multi-ethnic state. Its multi-ethniccharacter and willingness to grant territorial autonomy to minoritiesand to distinct sub-regions set it apart from other neighbouring‘national’ states, such as Romania or Bulgaria. Foreign policy shouldalso be aimed at ensuring the territorial integrity of the state bydeveloping peaceful relations with neighbours.16

2. Moldovans and Romanians have a common heritage, but their separatehistories from 1812 to 1918, and from 1940 to the present, havecreated distinct traditions and identities. The analogue for relationsbetween Romania and Moldova should not therefore be Germany, onenation briefly separated by the vicissitudes of war and then reunited asa single state, but rather Germany and Austria, two distinct peoplessharing a common linguistic and cultural heritage. Moldova thus has aspecial relationship with Romania, but this relationship does notexclude the maintenance of equally important ties with Russia,Ukraine and other countries.

3. Moldova should continue to develop cultural, political and economiclinks with the Russian Federation and other countries within the CIS.These links, however, should be built on the basis of genuinepartnership, not political and economic domination.

4. Moldova should remain a neutral state, as described in the 1994Constitution, but this neutrality could be re-examined depending onchanges in the regional and international environment.

By and large, it is this orientation that has defined Moldovan foreignrelations since independence. It is a set of ideas to which most centrist andeven centre-right political formations adhere.17

This desire for strong ties with a number of countries has meant thatMoldova has been an eager participant in various tri- and multilateralinitiatives that have sprung up across eastern Europe and the formerSoviet Union. In June 1997, the presidents of Ukraine, Romania and

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Moldova met in Sarajevo during a session of Central European Initiativeforeign ministers and agreed to elaborate a plan for Ukrainian–Romanian–Moldovan trans-border co-operation, especially in the areasof the upper Prut river and the lower Danube. The next month, thepresidents signed a joint statement in Izmail, Ukraine, committingthemselves to annual meetings to discuss further co-operation incustoms, policing, cross-border trade and development, and other issues.Likewise, Moldova has been an enthusiastic participant in the Black SeaEconomic Co-operation (BSEC) and in the informal caucus of five CISstates under the label GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan,Azerbaijan, Moldova).

It is in relations with Romania and Russia, though, that the practicalresults of the ‘Basarabist’ orientation are perhaps the clearest. Working inthe middle ground between Romania and Russia has not been easy, sinceelites in both Moscow and Bucharest tend to see Moldova’s warming toone side as evidence of a cooling in relations with the other. But for asmall country locked between two states that formerly controlled itsterritory, keeping both sides happy has become something of an art amongMoldovan foreign policy makers.

The Middle Ground: Moldova between Romania and Russia

Moldova has energetically built bridges to Romania and Russia. Thesections below sketch the key issues in these bilateral relationships,before moving on to a final discussion of the role of identity in foreignpolicy making.

Romania

In a speech before a joint session of the US Congress in July 1998, EmilConstantinescu averred that the ‘sensitive issues’ that remained betweenRomania and Moldova had been ‘resolved without tension’.18 Despite theRomanian president’s enthusiastic assessment, relations between theworld’s two Romanian states have run both hot and cold since 1991.Throughout the communist period, links between Romania and theMoldovan Soviet republic were minimal, although Nicolae Ceaușescuoccasionally raised the question of the 1940 territorial changes as a wayof demonstrating Romania’s foreign policy autonomy from Moscow.Apart from these veiled references to Bessarabia and several politicalexchanges (including a visit by Ceaușescu to Chișinău) in the late 1970s,there was little contact across the Prut river.

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With the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in December 1989, as well as agrowing pan-Romanian movement in Chișinău, relations between thetwo capitals developed quickly. Romania recognized Moldova’sdeclaration of independence only a few hours after the parliamentaryvote in Chișinău on 31 August 1991, the first country in the world to doso. Soon passport-free travel was instituted along the Prut river border,allowing Romanian and Moldovan citizens to cross with only an identitycard.19 In 1993, the Romanian parliament passed a special law on themandatory inclusion in each year’s state budget of a fund for developingties with Moldova; the amount of this fund, though, has been largelysymbolic – about 5,000 million Romanian lei (less than $600,000) in thelate 1990s.20 Romania has remained Moldova’s largest trading partneroutside the former Soviet space, but because Chișinău’s economy isoverwhelmingly oriented towards its former sister republics, the level oftrade has been necessarily low.

Despite the special relationship that has developed in the spheres ofeducation and culture, relations between political elites have oscillatedbetween avowals of pan-Romanian brotherhood and harsh exchangesbetween the two capitals. Immediately after independence, Moldovanpublic life was dominated by members and sympathizers of the PopularFront, who were intent on strengthening relations between the two states.By 1994, however, relations had begun to cool considerably, reachingtheir nadir at about the time of the Moldovan parliamentary elections inFebruary. The Moldovan government and parliament, as well as severalpolitical parties, issued declarations denouncing Romania’s interest inMoldova as foreign interference, and questioning the assertion byBucharest that the Moldovan language and identity were merelyRomanian. The Romanians countered with official pronouncements thatcondemned the Moldovan government for using the identity question inthe same way as their Soviet predecessors, for stifling democracy, and forpaving the way for demagoguery.

There were clear reasons for the change in relations between Moldovaand Romania, from public speculation about a political union of the twostates in 1991 to mutual recriminations by 1994. First, the nationalmovement of the late 1980s was far more complicated than manyobservers recognized. The popular meetings calling for sovereignty andeventually independence, the public pronouncements about the injusticesof the past, and the reappearance of the blue, yellow and red tricolour allseemed to point towards a rebirth of Romanian culture in a region fromwhich it had long been officially banished. But at the heart of the national

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movement were several groups which, although finding common groundin the calls for cultural revival and local self-government in 1989 and1990, had political interests that were fundamentally at odds. LocalMoldovan writers and historians hoped to engender a genuine culturalrenaissance that would lead, for some, towards political integration withRomania. Younger members of the communist party hoped to use thenational movement to undermine their older colleagues. Members of theMoldovan political elite saw in the movement a wedge to use against theRussians who had long dominated the republic’s institutions. And theleaders of other ethnic minorities, in particular Ukrainians, Bulgarians andGagauz (Orthodox Christian Turks), pursued their own agendas forcultural autonomy within the context of a general movement for politicaland social reform. While all these groups were united in their desire formore control over local resources and a revolution in relations betweenChișinău and Moscow, the movement of which they were a part was farmore complex than a simple drive for Romanian rebirth andRomanian–Moldovan union.

Second, once Moldova became independent and genuinely freepolitical competition became a possibility, the conflicting interests withinthe national movement quickly became evident. After 1991, several newpolitical parties emerged from beneath the umbrella of the Popular Front,and many of these new groups found themselves at odds with theincreasingly pan-Romanian orientation of the Front’s leadership. TheAgrarian Democratic Party, established in November 1991 andrepresenting the republic’s large agricultural and agro-industrial elite,emerged as the most powerful political force. This elite found thenational movement a convenient vehicle for undercutting the republic’straditional elite – the largely Russian nomenklatura, who had made theircareers in the industrial sector and who were mostly from Transnistria.Once this group had been defeated, or effectively confined to the DnestrMoldovan Republic, the elite quickly parted ways with the pan-Romanists.

Third, the rhetoric of pan-Romanian union alienated the republic’sminorities. Some, such as representatives of the Turkic Gagauz minorityin southern Moldova, were initially supportive of the Front, seeing in theMoldovan national movement a way of attracting greater attention for theplight of the economically underdeveloped south against a largelyunresponsive communist centre. But once the Front took on a moreethnically exclusive tone, the multi-ethnic coalition on which the Front’spower initially rested began to crumble.

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Finally, the question of Moldovan–Romanian relations has simply notbeen a major issue in Romanian domestic politics, and Romanianpoliticians have thus had little incentive to push the issue onto Romania’sforeign policy agenda. No party or politician disputes the idea that theSoviet annexation of Bessarabia was illegal and tragic, nor is there anyquestion among Romanians that the true identity of the Moldovans isRomanian. Most would even like, in an ideal world, to see the two statesjoined in a reconstituted Greater Romania. But most Romanian votersaccept these ideas as fundamental, so no political grouping can use theMoldovan question as a tool against any other. Accepting these tenets isone of the requirements for being a player in Romanian politics; it doesnot make a party or politician a winner. Indeed, in 1992 only oneRomanian presidential candidate put Moldovan–Romanian union on hisplatform, and that candidate, the former Moldovan prime minister MirceaDruc, emerged in last place among all the contenders. No one seriouslyraised the Moldovan question at all in the 1996 presidential andparliamentary elections; it was marginal in the 2001 campaign as well.

By 1997 and 1998, the relationship between the two capitals hadsettled considerably, with most of the elite accepting the notion, at least inthe medium term, of two independent states with their own recenthistories but sharing a common heritage. In the 1997 presidentialelections, Petru Lucinschi succeeded Mircea Snegur as Moldova’s secondpost-independence president, defeating Snegur in the second round with54 per cent of the vote. Given Lucinschi’s background, as a communistparty secretary in Tajikistan, a member of the all-union CPSU Politburo,and penultimate first secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia, therewere fears in Romania that Lucinschi would seek to bring Moldovafurther into the Russian sphere. But after his election, he quickly movedboth to repair relations with Romania and to maintain the already strongties with Russia. His first trip abroad was to Romania, and hesubsequently met frequently with the Romanian president, EmilConstantinescu, and encouraged ministerial exchanges and official visits.Interestingly, both heads of state were born in Bessarabia, Lucinschi innorth-central Bessarabia (Florești raion) in 1940, and Constantinescu ineastern Bessarabia (Bendery-Tighina, along the Dnestr river) in 1939.They were both countrymen of a sort, and their moderate stance on theidentity question allowed relations to evolve beyond the misplacedexuberance of 1991 and the recriminations of 1994.

The coolness returned by the end of the decade, however. Lucinschiand Constantinescu were soon both out of office, the former because of

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the victory of the communist party head, Voronin, the latter because of thereturn to power of the former Romanian president, Ion Iliescu. Still, therelationship rarely contained the mutual sniping of the past. Instead,Romania simply got on with its far more important foreign policy goals –joining the European Union and NATO. In Bucharest, Moldova was aforeign policy question that was rarely, if at all, on the agenda of foreignpolicy makers; and Moldovans likewise paid rather little attention togoings on west of the Prut river.

There are, of course, outstanding questions. The MoldovanConstitution still defines the state’s official language as ‘Moldovan’(limba moldovenească), even though there is nothing to distinguish itfrom Romanian. As in the case of Bulgaria and Macedonia, the questionof which language or languages inter-state treaties were to be drafted inhas sometimes prevented the countries from concluding co-operationagreements. In mid-1998, Moldova was also the only neighbour ofRomania with which Bucharest had not signed an inter-state treaty.Finding a mutually acceptable wording to address the Soviet annexation,to describe the special relationship between the two states (as ‘fraternal’or ‘good-neighbourly’), and to resolve the issue of dual citizenship(desired by Romania but prohibited in the Moldovan Constitution) werethe major obstacles to settlement.21 Some of these issues had been resolvedby the early years of the new century: Moldova, for example, changed itsConstitution to allow for dual citizenship. But none of these questions,however prickly, is likely to change the stable but cool relationshipbetween the two states.

Russia

Relations with Russia have been both less and more complex thanMoldova’s relations with Romania: less since the identity question is notsignificant, but more since Moldova has been historically far moredependent on Russia than on Romania. Much of present-day Moldova wasannexed by the Russian Empire from the independent Principality ofMoldova in 1812; the annexed region, Bessarabia, was ruled at first as anautonomous imperial district and later as a Russian guberniya.Throughout the nineteenth century, the Bessarabians were thus left outsidethe movement for pan-Romanian union that arose in the rump Moldovanprincipality, and outside the cultural and political reforms thataccompanied the creation of a unified Romanian state in 1859. It was notuntil 1918 that Bessarabia was joined with Greater Romania, and eventhen the Bessarabians’ presence within the Romanian kingdom lasted only

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until the annexation of the region by the Soviet Union. Over the past twocenturies, then, the Bessarabian Moldovans have been part of a Romanianstate for less than three decades.

The result of this mixed heritage has been both a cultural identity anda political orientation that have important Russian dimensions. First hasbeen an attempt to build good neighbourly relations with Russia whileescaping from Russia’s economic monopoly. In 1997 Russia accountedfor 70 per cent of Moldova’s exports and 50 per cent of its imports, andby 1998 Moldova’s energy debt to Russia amounted to some $215million (roughly 11 per cent of Moldova’s GDP).22 Russia’s gasmonopoly, Gazprom, periodically reduced deliveries to Moldovathroughout the 1990s; under increasing pressure from the Russiangovernment to pay its own arrears to the federal budget, Gazprom in mid-1998 threatened to cut off the supply completely unless Chișinău issuedover $100 million in government bonds to cover the debt.23 ManyMoldovan policy makers were concerned about the political influencethat Russia could wield via Gazprom, yet this aspect of theRussian–Moldovan relationship had more to do with simple economicsthan with any Russian grand strategy. It was precisely the economics ofthe relationship, though, that made moving beyond Russia’s sphere ofinfluence nearly impossible. Some gas and oil exploration began insouthern Moldova in 1997, and there was speculation that Moldovamight be able to join the Romanian energy grid, especially the electricitynetwork supplied by the Romanian nuclear reactor at Cernavodă. But thetechnical difficulties of both these projects meant that, at least in themedium term, Moldova would remain dependent on the RussianFederation for energy supplies.

A second aspect of the Russian–Moldovan relationship has beenMoldova’s policy of limited co-operation within the CIS. Any attempt byMoscow to consolidate the institutions of the CIS was strongly resisted byMoldova, along with other states such as Ukraine and Azerbaijan.Moldova refused to co-operate in the military sphere in particular,preferring instead to develop an array of strong bilateral relationships withthe former Soviet republics rather than to work within the multilateralframework of the CIS. Even among generally pro-Russian politicalfigures in Chișinău, such as President Lucinschi, there was considerablesuspicion of the CIS as a front for Russian political dominance. Therelationship became rather warmer with the coming to power of theMoldovan communists in 2001, but Moldova has remained one of the lessenthusiastic members of the commonwealth.

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Moreover, the continued presence of Russian troops in easternMoldova – some 2,000 by 2003 – gave a certain piquancy to the Russian–Moldovan relationship and underlined the Moldovan refusal to allowRussian basing rights within the context of CIS military agreements. TheChișinău government’s firm position was that the troops should becompletely removed, in line with the withdrawal agreement signed bySnegur and Yeltsin in October 1994 and confirmed at the OSCE Istanbulsummit in 1999. The Moldovans continued to press this issue withininternational organizations, such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe.But the fact that many of the remaining Russian troops were in fact localTransnistrians meant that ‘withdrawal’ was far more complex than simplyremoving the troops to Russia.

Related to the issue of military co-operation is the thorny problem ofTransnistria. Since the ceasefire agreement signed in 1992, Russia’sposition has been that the withdrawal of Russian troops must besynchronized with the granting of a special territorial status to Transnistriaand a resolution of the conflict. In fact, the 1994 withdrawal agreementuses precisely this language in describing the timetable for removingRussian troops. However, the Transnistrians have maintained that thepresence of Russian soldiers is a guarantee against the Moldovans’ optingfor a military solution to the separatist dispute, an option that was pursuedunder Snegur in 1992. Under the aegis of the OSCE, which has beenpresent in Moldova since 1993, the Russians have acted as co-signers ofany agreements negotiated between the Transnistrians and the Moldovans,and have generally played a supportive role in talks between Tiraspol andChișinău. But many in the Moldovan government continued to seeRussian influence in Transnistria, particularly the many agreementsreached between Transnistrian industrial concerns and military-industrialfirms in Russia, as one of the primary obstacles to a general settlement.24

Finally, Russia’s interests in Moldova extend beyond Transnistria tothe status of ethnic Russians in other parts of the republic. In fact, thereare far more Russians in areas under Chișinău’s control than inTransnistria, perhaps 400,000 in Bessarabia as against 150,000 east of theDnestr. But as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, these ‘Russians’have been slow to develop a clear ethnic identity. By the late 1990s, therewere numerous local associations claiming to represent the interests ofRussians in Moldova, but these were organizations that focused onprotecting a largely ‘Slavic’ or even ‘Soviet’ identity, or were devoted toexclusively economic or social concerns.25 The Russian foreign ministryand the State Duma continually stressed Russia’s duties towards the ethnic

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Russian minority, but there were no attempts to use the diaspora questionas a lever against Chișinău.

The European Dimension

A major change in foreign policy orientation that took place underPresident Lucinschi was Moldova’s insistence that European integrationrepresents a major ‘strategic priority’ of the country’s foreign policy.Relations with the EU had previously been minimal, a result both of theEU’s own ambivalence about building strong ties to countries with littlechance of EU membership in the medium term and of Moldova’s own lackof any real strategic foreign policy goals. Through the 1990s, though,Moldovan–EU trade grew considerably; by 1997, Moldova was alreadysending over $90 million in exports to EU countries and taking $227million in imports. These figures, however, paled in comparison withtrade with Russia and other CIS countries – some $448 million in exportsand $612 million in imports in the same year.26

Already in November 1994, President Snegur signed a partnership andco-operation agreement with the EU during an official visit to Brussels;the agreement became effective in July 1998 after ratification by theMoldovan parliament. In December 1997, under the Lucinschiadministration, Moldova applied for EU associate status, and in theofficial request, the government stressed that ‘Moldova’s strategic targetis to become a full member of the European Union’.27 Unlike otherapplicants for associate status, though, there is no clear constituencywithin the EU to support Moldova’s moving closer to the union. Chișinăuofficials frequently trumpet the country’s Latin heritage and goodrelations with Italy and France, and indeed, these and other countriesrepeatedly affirm their support for Moldova in the process of pan-European integration (Moldova, like Romania, is a member of LaFrancophonie). But given the country’s weak economy, the Transnistrianproblem and a host of other economic and political difficulties, EUmembership is no more than a very long-term goal. That the foreignministry and the presidency have taken a firm pro-European line,however, does give Moldova a clear set of guideposts to follow in theprocess of economic reform, and, if for no other reason than this, theattraction of closer ties to the EU may be a catalyst for further seriousreform at home.

Still, the decision to make EU membership a strategic goal has hadmore to do with the pro-European orientations of the foreign policy elite

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deep within the foreign ministry – younger, talented and multilingualbureaucrats, some of whom were trained in Romania and now see closerties with the West as the only salvation from continued dependence onRussia. It is not too uncharitable to say that presidents Lucinschi andVoronin and other, older members of the political elite – trained in thecommunist period and keen to maintain links to former party and statecomrades in power in Moscow and Kyiv – have had little idea what anEU association agreement would really entail and, indeed, the ways inwhich serious ties with the EU might preclude equally strong relationswith countries to the east. Moldova’s new-found European vocation,then, is really the work of a few, young, Western-leaning deputyministers and heads of department within the foreign ministry, rather thanthe result of visionary leadership coming from the presidential palace orparliament. But that, of course, is probably true of foreign policy makingin the West as well.

It is worth making a final point about Moldova’s relations with Europe,related to the question of ties with Romania, Bulgaria and countries toMoldova’s immediate west. Entry into the EU is – far more than the quest forNATO membership – a highly competitive game, since a serious drive formembership in the union inevitably changes a state’s relations withneighbouring countries. Visa restrictions must be put in place to shore up thenew external borders of the union; trade must be reoriented to the advantageof EU member-states; customs and policing must adapt to Europeanstandards. In the late 1990s, these changes in regional foreign policyrelationships were already being felt between countries that stood areasonable chance of EU membership in the short term and those whoseprospects were less clear: Poland’s relations with Lithuania and Belarus, forexample, and Hungary’s relations with Romania. The same could be said ofMoldova’s relations with other east European states. In 1999 Bulgariaimposed visa restrictions on Moldovans as a sign of good faith in reducingcross-border crime and immigration, should Bulgaria eventually enter theEU. Similar changes may well have a deleterious impact on the specialrelationship between Moldova and Romania. Citizens of the two countrieshave travelled freely across the border with only an official identity card, butif Romania becomes a serious contender for EU membership, thisarrangement will probably have to cease. Although politicians in bothBucharest and Chișinău continually promise mutual assistance on the road toEurope and identify EU membership as a common goal, Europeanintegration may in fact become a barrier to further pan-Romanian integration.

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Conclusion

Moldova is a country with foreign relations but with little overarchingforeign policy. Indeed, the idea of ‘Basarabism’, although occasionallymentioned by political analysts, describes more the accidental outcome ofMoldova’s multifaceted foreign policy directions than the deliberate goalof foreign policy making. Since independence, Chișinău has concentratedprimarily on the more limited and pragmatic aims of shoring up itsindependence and territorial integrity, and on building stable relationswith states in eastern Europe and the former Soviet space. It was only in1998 and 1999 that real steps were taken towards crafting a genuine visionof Moldovan foreign policy, focusing on multilateral links and theeventual goal of European integration.

That this agenda should be rather limited is, of course, hardly surprising.Moldovan policy makers work within a startling array of objectiveconstraints. The country is a little larger than Vermont or Wales; it islandlocked; it is effectively divided between two rival governments; and ithas no significant export potential apart from some excellent wines andbrandies, and other agricultural and light industrial products. Its economyremains dominated by the Russian Federation. Unlike the equally smallBaltic republics, Moldova has no clear supporters in the West, even thoughmost of its territory, like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, was illegallyannexed by the Soviet union in 1940. Unlike Armenia, the only post-Sovietrepublic smaller than Moldova, there is no clear constituency abroadsupporting Moldovan independence and sovereignty. Even Romania, theobvious intercessor for Moldova in Western capitals, is itself so consumedwith its own process of Euro-Atlantic integration that expending energy onthe brothers to the east is neither possible nor desirable. Given this array ofconstraints, one wonders how, even if all political actors in Chișinău agreedon what it meant to be a Moldovan, the country could still manage to havea clear and coherent foreign policy at all.

It is therefore difficult to know to what extent identity really matters inforeign policy making in the Moldovan case. Certainly, the specialrelationship that has developed with Romania since 1991, the cooling andwarming of relations between the two states, and Moldova’s continuedengagement with Russia are the result, in part, of the sense among mostpolicy makers that Moldova’s history and heritage are the product ofinteractions with both Romance-speaking and Slavic-speaking peoples.At the same time, though, Moldova’s taking a middle ground in itsrelations between Romania and Russia owes as much, if not more, to arealistic assessment of the options open to a small country situated on the

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periphery of Europe. Indeed, one need not turn to rarefied questions ofculture and nationhood to understand the objective limits within which theforeign policy elite has functioned in Moldova. While identity may helpexplain the political divisions within the state and the fractious nature ofMoldovan domestic politics since 1991, other issues – in particular, thecountry’s continued dependence on energy imports from Russia, thepresence of Russian military forces, and the simple lack of realalternatives to dependence on Moscow – are at least as important inaccounting for Moldova’s foreign policy directions.

NOTES

The author would like to thank Felicia Rosu for research assistance and Igor Botan, WilliamCrowther, Igor Munteanu, Vasile Nedelciuc, Liliana Popescu and Trevor Waters for their help andinsight.

1. Moldavskaya Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Kishinev (Chișinău): MoldavskayaSovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 1979), p.58. On the numerous historiographical debates aboutthe origins of the Moldovans, see Wim van Meurs, The Bessarabian Question in CommunistHistoriography (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1995).

2. On this period, see Ștefan Ciobanu, Unirea Basarabiei (Chișinău: Universitas, 1993); andAlexandru Bobeica, Sfatul Ţării: stindard al renașterii naţionale (Chișinău: Universitas,1993).

3. Florin Constantiniu, Între Hitler și Stalin: România și pactul Ribbentrop-Molotov(Bucharest: Danubius, 1991).

4. The famine of 1946–47 has become a subject of considerable study in post-Soviet Moldova:see the collection of previously unknown documents in Golod v Moldove (1946–1947):sbornik dokumentov (Chișinău: Știinţă, 1993); and the magisterial study by Mihai Gribincea,Agricultural Collectivization in Moldavia: Basarabia During Stalinism, 1944–1950(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1996).

5. The political struggles of the late 1980s are analysed in William Crowther, ‘The Politics ofEthno-national Mobilization: Nationalism and Reform in Soviet Moldavia’, Russian Review,Vol.50 (April 1990), pp.183–202.

6. Charles King, ‘Soviet Policy in the Annexed East European Borderlands: Language,Politics and Ethnicity in Moldova’, in Odd Arne Westad, Sven Holtsmark and Iver B.Neumann (eds.), The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945–89 (New York: St Martin’s,1994), p.87.

7. Data on this question are scarce, since the issue is far too political for most public opinionagencies in Moldova to tackle. But a 1992 survey by William Crowther of the University ofNorth Carolina at Greensboro showed that far more Romance-speaking Moldovans referredto themselves as ‘Moldovan’ than as ‘Romanian’; there was, however, an intriguingurban–rural split: more city-dwellers thought of themselves as Romanian than Moldovan,while the situation was opposite in the countryside: William Crowther, personalcommunication, 20 July 1998.

8. This argument was first developed in Charles King, ‘Who Are the Moldovans?’ OccasionalPapers in Romanian Studies, No.1 (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies,1995), pp.61–9.

9. The premier source on the role of these intellectuals in Bessarabia, in whose image manypost-Soviet intellectuals have fashioned themselves, is the work of Onisifor Ghibu, whoparticipated in the events surrounding the 1918 union: see his Pe baricadele vieţii (Chișinău:

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Universitas, 1992); În vîltoarea revoluţiei rusești (Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei CulturaleRomâne, 1993); Trei ani pe frontul basarabean (Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei CulturaleRomâne, 1996); De la Basarabia rusească la Basarabia românească (Bucharest: Semne,1997).

10. The most complete statements of this view are Petre P. Moldovan, Moldovenii în istorie(Chișinău: Poligraf-Service, 1993); and a speech by Mircea Snegur immediately before the1994 parliamentary elections, ‘Republica Moldova este ţara tuturor cetăţenilor săi’, Pămîntși oameni, 12 Feb. 1994, pp.1, 3.

11. See the history textbook by N.V. Babilunga and B.G. Bomeshko, Pagini din istoria plaiuluinatal (Tiraspol: Transnistrian Institute of Continuing Education, 1997).

12. On the high point of these discussions in 1994, see Charles King, ‘Moldovan Identity and thePolitics of Pan-Romanianism’, Slavic Review, Vol.53, No.2 (1994), pp.346–58.

13. The demonstrations erupted in March 1995 in response to a decision by Chișinău StateUniversity to replace courses in ‘Romanian history’, introduced after 1991, with new courseson ‘the history of Moldova’. The decision, which was ultimately reversed, was part of agradual turning away from the euphoric pan-Romanism of the early 1990s. President Snegur,supporting the strike, launched a new initiative to revise Article 13 of the MoldovanConstitution by naming the official language of the republic ‘Romanian’ rather than‘Moldovan’ as written; this initiative was rejected by the parliament. On these events, seeNicolae Roibu, Primăvara demnitaţii noastre (Chișinău: Glasul, 1997). Similardemonstrations were held in 2002 when the communist government attempted to re-institutemandatory Russian-language study in schools.

14. After the 1998 elections, the Christian-Democratic Popular Front (headed by Iurie Roșca),the Party of Rebirth and Reconciliation (Mircea Snegur), the Party of Democratic Forces(Valeriu Matei), and the Movement for a Democratic and Prosperous Moldova (DumitruDiacov) agreed to co-operate in parliament against the Party of Communists, who held aplurality of seats. However, ministerial positions in the government were handed mainly tonon-party professionals or to individuals who broadly supported Dumitru Diacov’s centristparty.

15. ‘Concepţia politicii externe a Republicii Moldova’, Monitorul Oficial al Republicii Moldova,6 April 1995, pp.10–14.

16. Article 111 of the Moldovan Constitution guarantees territorial autonomy for both theGagauz and the Transnistrians. The law on Gagauz autonomy was promulgated in 1995 andthe Gagauz have since elected their own governor and local administration. TheTransnistrians, though, have not accepted the offer of autonomy, seeking full independenceinstead. On Gagauz autonomy, see Charles King, ‘Minorities Policy in the Post-SovietRepublics: The Case of the Gagauz’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.20, No.4 (1997),pp.738–56.

17. For evidence of this orientation, see the responses by these and other parties to thequestionnaire in ‘Expres-ancheta “AP”’, Arena politicii, Feb. 1997, pp.17–19. Thequestionnaire addressed specifically the issue of Transnistria, but it is illustrative of theseparties’ general orientations, particularly on relations with Romania and Russia.

18. Address by Emil Constantinescu, President of Romania, at a joint meeting of the UnitedStates Congress, 15 July 1998.

19. Tatiana Popa, deputy director, Directorate for Romania’s Relations with the Republic ofMoldova, Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, interview with the author, Bucharest, 3June 1998.

20. Ibid.21. Iurie Panzaru, counsellor to the president of Moldova, interview with the author,

Washington, DC, 15 July 1998. 22. Moldova: Economic Trends, January–March 1998 (Brussels: European Commission, DGIA,

1998), p.112.23. Reuters, 13 July 1998.24. The fact that Chișinău has no control over any economic or political activity east of the

Dnestr river meant that the Transnistrian leadership was free to conclude contracts with any

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firms, whether in the former Soviet Union or beyond. By late 1997, the Transnistrians hadbegun to produce small arms as they had done during the Soviet period, and there wasconsiderable speculation that Transnistria had become a major supplier of arms in theBalkans.

25. See Neil J. Melvin, ‘The Russians: Diaspora and the End of Empire’, in Charles King andNeil J. Melvin (eds.), Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in theFormer Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), pp.27–57.

26. Moldova: Economic Trends, Quarterly Issue (July–Sept. 1998) (Chișinău: Ministry ofEconomy and Reform, 1998), p.102.

27. Infotag, 12 Dec. 1997, reported in World News Connection (electronic version).

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