Constructing Romania’s foreign policy and security role in its eastern neighbourhood: the cases of Moldova and Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Acknowledging the changes that have occurred over the past years in the geopolitical milieu of Eastern Europe, this paper looks at how Romania frames its foreign policy and security role towards its eastern neighbours, as reflected in the country’s official discourse. This study shows how Romania’s external behaviour has been impacted at the discursive level by membership in NATO and the EU. While it finds that a congruence between public discourse and external actions generally exits in the case of Moldova, this is only partial in relation to Ukraine. The paper employs discourse and content analyses to identify the main narratives employed by Romania vis-à-vis the two eastern neighbours over a ten-year timeframe, 2009–2019, and examines whether the country’s official discourse has been followed by concrete foreign policy actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Role theory
• Romania
• Moldova
• Ukraine
• discourse
• foreign policy

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank SEBSS anonymous referees and editors for their detailed comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is the longest external land border (roughly 1840 km) belonging to a country, which is both a NATO and a EU member.

2. No less than eight ministers, some of them serving two terms at different time intervals, have been responsible for the activity of the MFA in the last decade. All of them served for less than 3 years. In chronological order: Cristian Diaconescu (22 December 2008–1 October 2009; 24 January 2012–7 May 2012), Teodor Baconschi (2009–2012), Andrei Marga (7 May 2012–6 August 2012), Titus Corlățean (6 August 2012–10 November 2014), Teodor Meleșcanu (10 November 2014–24 November 2014; 4 January 2017–15 July 2019), Lazăr Comănescu (17 November 2015–4 January 2017), Ramona Mănescu (24 July – 4 November 2019) and Bogdan Aurescu (24 November 2014–17 November 2015; 4 November 2019 – to date). Likewise, in the same period, eight prime-ministers have been in charge of the activity of the Romanian government, while the ministerial cabinets they have been heading changed thirteen times.

3. Whilst conducting CA in Atlas.ti, tool words such as a, the, in, and, to, of etc. were excluded from the analysis. In addition, different forms of a word were considered as a single unit (for instance, the words minorities/minority were considered as minority, European Union/EU/Union were considered as EU, Euro-Atlantic Union/North Atlantic Alliance/NATO were considered as NATO etc.). Accordingly, the replacement of the words was done in the text corpus from the beginning of the analysis. Moreover, other specific words in the website archive (such as, press-release, date, MFA, Romania/Romania’s/Romanian, Ukraine/Ukraine’s/Ukrainian, Moldova/Moldova’s/Moldovan, Bucharest, Chisinau, Kyiv etc.) were not included in the analysis. Finally, the associated words or synonyms were united under one code (for instance, European path/European course/European vector were coded as European path or school/university/scholarship were coded as education).

4. Henceforth the words, which constitute the narrative construction, are mentioned starting from the most frequent.

5. Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889) is generally regarded as the most famous and influential poet both in Romania and in Moldova.

6. Roughly 150.000 Romanians live in Ukraine, according to the 2001 census, most of which being located in Chernivtsi oblast (State Committee of Statistics of Ukraine 2001).

7. Article 7 of the Law on Education adopted in Ukraine in September 2017 refers to the teaching hours in minority languages. Romania has expressed concern over the language provisions of this article, seen by Romanian authorities as an attempt to weaken the rights of Romanian minority in Ukraine.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0073, within PNCDI III. For more details about this research project, entitled “Boosting Romania’s role as a security provider in its immediate vicinity (the cases of Ukraine and Moldova)”.

Notes on contributors

Teodor Lucian Moga

Teodor Lucian Moga is lecturer in IR and European studies at the Centre for European Studies, Faculty of Law, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi (UAIC). He previously pursued a PhD in Economics and International Relations at UAIC and a MA in Political Science at the University of Manchester, UK. In the past he worked for the European Commission, British Embassy (Bucharest, Romania) and held appointments at the at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (Paris, France), the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany) and the Romanian Academy of Science.

Nadiia Bureiko

Nadiia Bureiko is ‘Ukraine Abroad’ Programme Director at the Foreign Policy Council ‘Ukrainian Prism’ and researcher in the project ‘Transcultural Contact Zones in Ukraine’ at the Centre for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Nadiia completed her post-doctoral research at the University of St. Gallen and a research fellowship at the New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania. Prior to this, Nadiia Bureiko obtained her MA in International Relations and PhD in Political Science at Yurii Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine, where she also worked as an assistant at the Department of International Relations.

Loredana Maria Simionov

Loredana Maria Simionov is a researcher at the Centre for European Studies of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. She holds a PhD in Economics and International Affairs, having as main research interests the post-Soviet space, as well as the EU’s relations with Russia and its eastern European neighbours. Her research is primarily focused on interdisciplinary approaches meant to decipher the complexity of this geopolitical space, thus combining concepts and insights from international relations, international economics, as well as European integration processes and policies. Additional research interests: EU foreign policy and resilience, the resilience of democracy, the future of democracy and digitalization.