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rfmcdonaldThe failure, after the collapse of Communism in first Romania then in the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, of Moldova to rejoin Romania, was often seen as a surprise. It shouldn’t have, though, for if one uses the term "reunification," one implies that there were underlying commonalities between the several separated components of the nation. In the case of Romania and Moldova, these commonalities were ultimately superficial and insignificant.
Interwar Romania was a country faced with the task of integrating territories from three different regimes into a single nation-state. The first of these, of course, was the pre-war territory of the Kingdom of Romania, occupying the lowland districts of Moldavia and Wallachia, unified since the 1860s and ethnically relatively homogeneous. The second was the formerly Hungarian Principality of Transylvania, a territory roughly two-thirds Romanian by population but with large Magyar and Szekler, Saxon, Jewish, and Romany minorities, existing at a higher level of socioeconomic development than the Old Kingdom. The third was the formerly Russian territory of Bessarabia, mostly populated by Romanian-speakers but with substantial Slavic and Jewish populations existing alongside the national majority population. In all, barely three-quarters of Romania’s population was ethnically Romanian.
Despite the presence of large and restive non-Romanian minorities amounting to almost 40% of Transylvania’s population, the former Hapsburg territory’s Romanian nationalist credentials were solid, as clumsy Hungarian attempts at Magyarization only galvanized Romanian nationalist sentiments. Formerly Tsarist Bessarabia, though, was different. In Transylvania, the cultural gaps between the Latinate and Orthodox Romanians and the Catholic and Protestant Magyars of Mitteleuropa could not be bridged. The differences between Orthodox Christian Romanians and Slavs in Bessarabia were much less significant, particularly since Tsarist Russia and Romanian peasants alike shared a common dislike for the Ottoman Muslims who once dominated the entire northern and western rim of the Black Sea, while the Russification of Bessarabia accelerated as this province (along with southern Ukraine) was opened to mass settlement.
Interwar Romania did its best to assimilate the formerly non-Romanian territories under its sway using a fairly classical program of nation-building, forcibly marginalizing the public role of former imperial languages (German, Magyar, Russians) to make room for Romanian while expanding the presence of a public education system functioning in the Romanian language and making use of Romanian national myths, and of establishing alliances with foreign powers to protect the integrity of Romania’s expanded national territory. Given enough time, it would have worked.
The Canadian poet Stephen Henighan wrote the book Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family about his experiences as a language teacher in independent Moldova in the early and mid-1990s. Henighan describes how the Soviet Union took particular care to disrupt the Romanian-identified elite of formerly Romanian Bessarabia, especially after the 1944 reconquest of the province (retaken by Romania in 1941):
By the time that Stalin died, a Moldavian identity forcibly separated from the Romanian had been formed. The Romanian nationalist identification of the region of Bessarabia as terra irredenta was formally renounced. A new Moldavian nation, with a vernacular language written in Cyrillic script nonetheless subordinated to a Russian establish as the dominant language of urban and professional life, was proclaimed to exist.
One thing that struck Henighan upon his arrival in Moldova was the presence of a pervasive myth--particularly among Russophones--of Moldova’s utter backwardness upon the arrival of Soviet rule, and of the belief that this backwardness required Soviet domination and Russification in order to be remedied. This myth was accepted as a matter of course by Russophones, whether of Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, or migrant descent; Russophones, for instance, insisted that the effects of Soviet rule were wholly positive, bought into the myth of Moldovan as a language separate from Romanian even against the protests of ethnic Romanians, and saw Moldova’s future as intimately linked with the Soviet Union and a broader Russophone space. Russophone opposition to the prospect of Moldovan annexation into Romania, in fact, precipitated the formation of the Transdnestr parastate, later supported by Russia in its intrasigeance against Chisisnau.
More perniciously, perhaps, many Moldovans also bought this myth. The liquidation of the pre-Soviet cultural and political elites, and the forcible suppression of memories capable of contradicting Soviet arguments, compromised the possibilities of a pro-annexationist mentality. Many ethnic Romanians, suspicious of domination from Bucharest, were careful to guard a separate language identity. Russian remained widely used as a language of wider communication, with code-switching occurring frequently--if a dozen Romanian-speakers found themselves in a dialogue with a single Russophone, rather than use Romanian Henighan recorded a tendency to switch to Russian instead.
In the end, although the means used by the Soviet Union were certainly illegitimate, they had successfully created a Moldovan nation. Henighan quoted one of his friends as saying that Moldovans have "become a different people from Romanians. We speak the same language, but we do things in different ways. We're a mixed people. I'm one of five sisters, all of us married to Russians, Belorussians, or Ukrainians. The language of this country must be Romanian, but we must also recognize that it's now a different country from Romania."
Unfortunately, Henighan continues, "in nearly two months in Moldova [he] had not heard anyone express such a nuanced vision of the country's cultural convulsions" (126).
Let’s say that in the Crimean War, Austria got involved against Russia in alliance with the Anglo-French-Sardinian coalition. It could have happened, given Austrian concern about Russia’s growing strength and emerging Great Power intentions towards southeastern Europe. At the end of the war, the Austrians might want to limit Russia’s ability to project its power into its hinterland, and so it requires the cession of the Russian province of Bessarabia to the Danubian principality of Moldavia. Come 1860, this enlarged Moldavia would unite with the principality of Wallachia to form the nucleus of the Kingdom of Romania, and Bucharest would rule over lands stretching from the Danube to the Dnestr.
After a half-century of Russian rule and with continued proximity to the Tsarist Empire’s Slavic populations, Bessarabia--or, rather, eastern Moldavia--would rank as a distinctive outlying region of the emerging Romanian nation-state. It wouldn’t stand out particularly, though; a Slavic minority wouldn’t differentiate Romanian eastern Moldavia particularly from Wallachia or western Moldavia. You’d still have a Romanian-speaking peasantry, with relatively important Romany and Jewish minorities, all ruled by a Romanian-identified governing class, all participating in a relatively underdeveloped agricultural economy. Over the next half-century, Romania’s different regions would be consolidated, while Austria and Russia would compete for influence in the potentially prosperous Romanian kingdom. By the time that the First World War or an equivalent conflict occurred in the first part of the 20th century, Bessarabia would be as Romanian a province as Wallachia or Moldavia.
Instead of imagining a more prosperous and earlier-unified Greater Romania, let's imagine the reverse. Let's say that, after the Second World War, the frontiers of the Cold War bisected Romania. I've been chatting about the idea with Alexander Bossy; this northeastern shift of the Iron Curtain was originally imagined to be produced by the involvement of a larger Greece attacked by an irredentist Axis Turkey, but the precise origins are unimportant. (Perhaps Bulgaria was able to defect from the Axis and serve as a platform for Allied advances, perhaps a non-irredentist Turkey was coaxed onto the side of the Allies.) At the end of the conflict, Romania is trisected between a Kingdom of Romania including Wallachia and southern Transylvania, a Communized Hungary retaining northern Transylvania (and encouraged by this retention of territory though perhaps not its Romanian population to move closer to Hungary), and a greater Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic including Bessarabia and modern Moldova.
Let's imagine that the history of Cold War Europe proceeds roughly as it did with due exceptions made for southeastern Europe, and that in the late 1980s or early 1990s the Soviet Union dissolves, leaving an independent Moldovan state. This Moldova, though, would be different, firstly by virtue of including a much larger ethnically Romanian population--and a more nationalistic Romanian population--than the Moldavian SSR of our history, secondly by having a large and relatively prosperous capitalist Romanian state to cleave to. Reunification would certainly be difficult, not least because of the relatively smaller demographic and economic disparities between independent Romania and post-Soviet Moldova than between West and East Germany. Still, there would be a persuasive logic for reunification founded on the reality of an unjust division of a nation. Reunified Romania in the European Union by 2004?
Finally, East Germans seem to have welcomed absorption into the West German Bundesrepublik substantially because their country’s economy was failing and West Germany’s economy was booming. The disparity between a stagnant and declining East German economy and a growing and prosperous West German economy created a tangible economic incentive for reunification quite apart from soft sentiments of nationalism. Migration from the East to the West was both a symptom of the impending reunification and reunification’s own cause.
If Romania had remained non-Communist while the Moldavian SSR suffered under Stalinism and subsequent incarnations of Soviet Marxist-Leninist philosophy, there may have been a Romanian Wende, as Moldavians crossed the Prut to find work. If Romania had remained Communist but was a relatively liberal Communist state like Hungary, or at least a relatively prosperous Communist state like Czechoslovakia, there might still have been a Romanian Wende. Romania, though, was among the poorest and most authoritarian of the Soviet Union’s Communist satellites, and after December of 1989 it went through one of the most tortuous and difficult transitions of any Soviet satellite. For the critical window of time after Romania’s democratization and before Moldovan independence and civil war--that time period when reunification was perhaps most possible--there lacked any significant economic or political incentive for a Moldova still enjoying a relatively comfortable stagnation to risk all for reunification.
And now? If Moldova joined Romania, whether with or without Transdnestr, it would join the Baltic States on the short list of former Soviet territories managing to escape directly to the European Union. Moldovans would be free to migrate (or, at least, as free as their fellow citizens in old Romania) across the European Union; Moldova would qualify for European Union transfer payments.
This isn’t likely, though, simply because the Moldovan state has acquired despite itself an innate inertia of its own, with mass emigration sapping its work force and its energies, the ethnic conflict dominating its conservative post-Communist political elites’ focus, and little incentive for innovation on any front. Moldova, once a prosperous component of the Soviet Union, is now the poorest country in Europe. Moldova's now of note as a source of sex slaves and organ sellers, which makes the prospect of Romanian and/or European Union expansion all the more difficult.
Romanian reunification might still be possible, if only in the sense that Romanian-identifying Moldovans might mostly emigrate to Romania, leaving their more Moldova-identified friends and relatives at home. At this point, any true reunification--the establishment of a single state, or of a confederation, or of a union-state--seems massively unlikely.
Interwar Romania was a country faced with the task of integrating territories from three different regimes into a single nation-state. The first of these, of course, was the pre-war territory of the Kingdom of Romania, occupying the lowland districts of Moldavia and Wallachia, unified since the 1860s and ethnically relatively homogeneous. The second was the formerly Hungarian Principality of Transylvania, a territory roughly two-thirds Romanian by population but with large Magyar and Szekler, Saxon, Jewish, and Romany minorities, existing at a higher level of socioeconomic development than the Old Kingdom. The third was the formerly Russian territory of Bessarabia, mostly populated by Romanian-speakers but with substantial Slavic and Jewish populations existing alongside the national majority population. In all, barely three-quarters of Romania’s population was ethnically Romanian.
Despite the presence of large and restive non-Romanian minorities amounting to almost 40% of Transylvania’s population, the former Hapsburg territory’s Romanian nationalist credentials were solid, as clumsy Hungarian attempts at Magyarization only galvanized Romanian nationalist sentiments. Formerly Tsarist Bessarabia, though, was different. In Transylvania, the cultural gaps between the Latinate and Orthodox Romanians and the Catholic and Protestant Magyars of Mitteleuropa could not be bridged. The differences between Orthodox Christian Romanians and Slavs in Bessarabia were much less significant, particularly since Tsarist Russia and Romanian peasants alike shared a common dislike for the Ottoman Muslims who once dominated the entire northern and western rim of the Black Sea, while the Russification of Bessarabia accelerated as this province (along with southern Ukraine) was opened to mass settlement.
Interwar Romania did its best to assimilate the formerly non-Romanian territories under its sway using a fairly classical program of nation-building, forcibly marginalizing the public role of former imperial languages (German, Magyar, Russians) to make room for Romanian while expanding the presence of a public education system functioning in the Romanian language and making use of Romanian national myths, and of establishing alliances with foreign powers to protect the integrity of Romania’s expanded national territory. Given enough time, it would have worked.
The Canadian poet Stephen Henighan wrote the book Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family about his experiences as a language teacher in independent Moldova in the early and mid-1990s. Henighan describes how the Soviet Union took particular care to disrupt the Romanian-identified elite of formerly Romanian Bessarabia, especially after the 1944 reconquest of the province (retaken by Romania in 1941):
In 1944 the Soviet Union reconquered Bessarabia. Vyacheslav Molotov and Joseph Stalin worked far harder than the tsars to alter the territory's character. The respected Romanian dissident Paul Goma, who fled Bessarabia at this time, reports that the Soviet troops burned on large bonfires all books printed in the Latin alphabet. [. . .]
During the first year of Soviet occupation, three hundred thousand Romanians were removed from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and scattered through Siberia and other remote tracts of the Soviet Union. By 1953 authorities in Moscow had dispatched more than two hundred and fifty thousand Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars to Bessarabia to serve as civil servants, teachers, soldiers, and police officers. The tally of Romanian-speaking deportees to far-flung districts of the Soviet Union surpassed 1.1 million. The 1946-47 famine killed more than one hundred thousand peasants. The society of "Moldavia beyond the Prut," as Romanians called the region, had been decapitated. Few Romanians endowed with education, initiative, or professional skills were allowed to remain" (9-10).
By the time that Stalin died, a Moldavian identity forcibly separated from the Romanian had been formed. The Romanian nationalist identification of the region of Bessarabia as terra irredenta was formally renounced. A new Moldavian nation, with a vernacular language written in Cyrillic script nonetheless subordinated to a Russian establish as the dominant language of urban and professional life, was proclaimed to exist.
One thing that struck Henighan upon his arrival in Moldova was the presence of a pervasive myth--particularly among Russophones--of Moldova’s utter backwardness upon the arrival of Soviet rule, and of the belief that this backwardness required Soviet domination and Russification in order to be remedied. This myth was accepted as a matter of course by Russophones, whether of Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, or migrant descent; Russophones, for instance, insisted that the effects of Soviet rule were wholly positive, bought into the myth of Moldovan as a language separate from Romanian even against the protests of ethnic Romanians, and saw Moldova’s future as intimately linked with the Soviet Union and a broader Russophone space. Russophone opposition to the prospect of Moldovan annexation into Romania, in fact, precipitated the formation of the Transdnestr parastate, later supported by Russia in its intrasigeance against Chisisnau.
More perniciously, perhaps, many Moldovans also bought this myth. The liquidation of the pre-Soviet cultural and political elites, and the forcible suppression of memories capable of contradicting Soviet arguments, compromised the possibilities of a pro-annexationist mentality. Many ethnic Romanians, suspicious of domination from Bucharest, were careful to guard a separate language identity. Russian remained widely used as a language of wider communication, with code-switching occurring frequently--if a dozen Romanian-speakers found themselves in a dialogue with a single Russophone, rather than use Romanian Henighan recorded a tendency to switch to Russian instead.
In the end, although the means used by the Soviet Union were certainly illegitimate, they had successfully created a Moldovan nation. Henighan quoted one of his friends as saying that Moldovans have "become a different people from Romanians. We speak the same language, but we do things in different ways. We're a mixed people. I'm one of five sisters, all of us married to Russians, Belorussians, or Ukrainians. The language of this country must be Romanian, but we must also recognize that it's now a different country from Romania."
Unfortunately, Henighan continues, "in nearly two months in Moldova [he] had not heard anyone express such a nuanced vision of the country's cultural convulsions" (126).
Let’s say that in the Crimean War, Austria got involved against Russia in alliance with the Anglo-French-Sardinian coalition. It could have happened, given Austrian concern about Russia’s growing strength and emerging Great Power intentions towards southeastern Europe. At the end of the war, the Austrians might want to limit Russia’s ability to project its power into its hinterland, and so it requires the cession of the Russian province of Bessarabia to the Danubian principality of Moldavia. Come 1860, this enlarged Moldavia would unite with the principality of Wallachia to form the nucleus of the Kingdom of Romania, and Bucharest would rule over lands stretching from the Danube to the Dnestr.
After a half-century of Russian rule and with continued proximity to the Tsarist Empire’s Slavic populations, Bessarabia--or, rather, eastern Moldavia--would rank as a distinctive outlying region of the emerging Romanian nation-state. It wouldn’t stand out particularly, though; a Slavic minority wouldn’t differentiate Romanian eastern Moldavia particularly from Wallachia or western Moldavia. You’d still have a Romanian-speaking peasantry, with relatively important Romany and Jewish minorities, all ruled by a Romanian-identified governing class, all participating in a relatively underdeveloped agricultural economy. Over the next half-century, Romania’s different regions would be consolidated, while Austria and Russia would compete for influence in the potentially prosperous Romanian kingdom. By the time that the First World War or an equivalent conflict occurred in the first part of the 20th century, Bessarabia would be as Romanian a province as Wallachia or Moldavia.
Instead of imagining a more prosperous and earlier-unified Greater Romania, let's imagine the reverse. Let's say that, after the Second World War, the frontiers of the Cold War bisected Romania. I've been chatting about the idea with Alexander Bossy; this northeastern shift of the Iron Curtain was originally imagined to be produced by the involvement of a larger Greece attacked by an irredentist Axis Turkey, but the precise origins are unimportant. (Perhaps Bulgaria was able to defect from the Axis and serve as a platform for Allied advances, perhaps a non-irredentist Turkey was coaxed onto the side of the Allies.) At the end of the conflict, Romania is trisected between a Kingdom of Romania including Wallachia and southern Transylvania, a Communized Hungary retaining northern Transylvania (and encouraged by this retention of territory though perhaps not its Romanian population to move closer to Hungary), and a greater Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic including Bessarabia and modern Moldova.
Let's imagine that the history of Cold War Europe proceeds roughly as it did with due exceptions made for southeastern Europe, and that in the late 1980s or early 1990s the Soviet Union dissolves, leaving an independent Moldovan state. This Moldova, though, would be different, firstly by virtue of including a much larger ethnically Romanian population--and a more nationalistic Romanian population--than the Moldavian SSR of our history, secondly by having a large and relatively prosperous capitalist Romanian state to cleave to. Reunification would certainly be difficult, not least because of the relatively smaller demographic and economic disparities between independent Romania and post-Soviet Moldova than between West and East Germany. Still, there would be a persuasive logic for reunification founded on the reality of an unjust division of a nation. Reunified Romania in the European Union by 2004?
Finally, East Germans seem to have welcomed absorption into the West German Bundesrepublik substantially because their country’s economy was failing and West Germany’s economy was booming. The disparity between a stagnant and declining East German economy and a growing and prosperous West German economy created a tangible economic incentive for reunification quite apart from soft sentiments of nationalism. Migration from the East to the West was both a symptom of the impending reunification and reunification’s own cause.
If Romania had remained non-Communist while the Moldavian SSR suffered under Stalinism and subsequent incarnations of Soviet Marxist-Leninist philosophy, there may have been a Romanian Wende, as Moldavians crossed the Prut to find work. If Romania had remained Communist but was a relatively liberal Communist state like Hungary, or at least a relatively prosperous Communist state like Czechoslovakia, there might still have been a Romanian Wende. Romania, though, was among the poorest and most authoritarian of the Soviet Union’s Communist satellites, and after December of 1989 it went through one of the most tortuous and difficult transitions of any Soviet satellite. For the critical window of time after Romania’s democratization and before Moldovan independence and civil war--that time period when reunification was perhaps most possible--there lacked any significant economic or political incentive for a Moldova still enjoying a relatively comfortable stagnation to risk all for reunification.
And now? If Moldova joined Romania, whether with or without Transdnestr, it would join the Baltic States on the short list of former Soviet territories managing to escape directly to the European Union. Moldovans would be free to migrate (or, at least, as free as their fellow citizens in old Romania) across the European Union; Moldova would qualify for European Union transfer payments.
This isn’t likely, though, simply because the Moldovan state has acquired despite itself an innate inertia of its own, with mass emigration sapping its work force and its energies, the ethnic conflict dominating its conservative post-Communist political elites’ focus, and little incentive for innovation on any front. Moldova, once a prosperous component of the Soviet Union, is now the poorest country in Europe. Moldova's now of note as a source of sex slaves and organ sellers, which makes the prospect of Romanian and/or European Union expansion all the more difficult.
Romanian reunification might still be possible, if only in the sense that Romanian-identifying Moldovans might mostly emigrate to Romania, leaving their more Moldova-identified friends and relatives at home. At this point, any true reunification--the establishment of a single state, or of a confederation, or of a union-state--seems massively unlikely.
