“The Communists cannot take us to Europe”: negotiating Moldova's place in the post-socialist world

Abstract

In 2005, Moldova's Communist Party was re-elected to power on a platform that promised unification with the European Union, reversing the position officially held since 2001 which oriented the country toward Russia. The Party's new orientation also sparked widespread debate, especially within intellectual circles, as many individuals found themselves in the strange position of being ideologically anti-Communist and pro-European, at a moment when Communists themselves had become pro-European. This paper aims to capture the use of ‘Europe’ in the social and political negotiations of culture workers, whose professional identity includes a strong element of political opposition, and to explore how the increased proximity and power of the European Union to Moldova has caused the social and political geography of ‘Europe’ to shift within Moldova.

Keywords:

• symbolic geography
• Moldova
• post-socialism
• Europe
• Europeanization

Acknowledgements

While writing and revising this article I have been a Center Associate with the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and am grateful to both institutions for extending access to much-valued resources. Previous versions of this article were presented at the “Hour of Romania” conference at Indiana University, March 2007, and as part of the invited session “Imagining the New Europe” at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, April 2007. Comments and suggestions from other panelists and participants, especially those from Marina Cap-Bun and Robert Kaiser, were much appreciated. Chad Staddon, Craig Young, Christian Sellar, Alyson Greiner, and two anonymous reviewers have also provided useful guidance in revising the paper for publication. Neither funders, institutions, nor readers of previous drafts, however, bear responsibility for my final conclusions and interpretations.

Notes

1. This research was funded by a short-term travel grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). I continued to document uses of ‘Europe’ in the discourse of culture workers in June-August 2006 while focused on a different research project concerning the revival of village Saints’ Days with an ACTR-administered Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). I thank both funders for their generous financial support.

2. The Romanian term in local use is oameni de cultură (“people of culture” or “culture people”). Elsewhere, I have used Maureen Mahon's (2000) term “cultural producers” to highlight their common identity of “working for culture.” In this paper, I have adopted “culture worker,” despite its awkwardness, to highlight the common employment situation of the majority of these individuals in institutions subordinate to the Ministry of Culture or local Departments of Culture.

3. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

4. My informants agree that the Moldovan language and culture is scientifically identical to Romanian language and culture, but they still disagree about whether a distinctly Moldovan identity exists, and what the political implications of that identity ought to be.

5. eMoldova was an electronic listserv of news from Moldova; its advantage over other services is that it compiled stories from several news agencies.

6. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this parallel.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer R. Cash

Jennifer R. Cash is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany