Alin Rus
Massachusetts University, Amherst, USA
rusalin445@yahoo.com
The Romanian or the Moldavian Language?
Language as an artificial boundary among the inhabitants of a new state
Abstract: This article briefly discusses the idea of boundary as it appears in the history of anthropology and focuses as a case study on the ex-soviet Republic called Moldavia and its language after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of a new state: Moldavia Republic. Using the tools and methods of Cultural Anthropology I will show how, in Moldavia Republic the traces of the artificial boundaries drawn during Soviet times are still visible today. One of these boundaries is the artificial distinction between Moldavian and Romanian language as two separate languages and between Moldavian people and Romanian people as two separate ethnic groups. My main argument in this article is that the very long and convoluted discourse focusing on language politics in a new state, the Moldavian Republic, is a consequence of the artificial boundaries that were imposed in all the aspects of the public life during Soviet time.
Keywords: Eastern Europe; Communist Heritage; Ideology of Boundaries; Language Politics; Moldavian Language; Romanian Language.
Moldavia became independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in August 1991. Still, the geo-political situation of the new state, together with identitarian problems and language politics, became common problems and boundaries in the interethnic relations among people immediately after the declaration of independence on 27 August, 1991. The above-mentioned issues became sources of conflict, social movement and intense debate from 1991 through today. Another idea discussed in this article is that of the language politics and the intense debate around them in the Moldavian Republic after August 1991. One of the thorniest problems was that of the official name of the country’s language – Moldavian or Romanian. I will show how the discussion around the official language name and the language politics of this new country reflect its agitated history, its complicated heritage and a convoluted ideology of (language) boundaries.
The Idea of Boundary in Anthropology
The idea of “boundary” is a perennial problem in Anthropology. The first “objects” studied by this discipline were the so called “primitive societies”. Studying primitive people already involve a distinction, or a boundary between “civilized” and “primitive people”. The thought of the first anthropologists could not take distance from the main concepts that dominated the Colonial period: racism, ethnicism and exclusivism (Eriksen & Nielsen, 2001). All these concepts became real boundaries among people during this entire historical period.
During the Classical Period of Anthropology (1920-1960) as well as during its Golden Age (1960-1980) we can observe a major preoccupation of many anthropologists to prove that many of the old concepts coming from the Colonial Period are just artificial borders, intentionally constructed and implemented in order to provide access to valuable resources for the “civilized” nations (Otterbein, 1999). A demonstration like this is constructed by Fredrik Barth in his book “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries”. In this work ethnicity is seen as a form of social organization, and it is suggested that there is no simple relationship between ethnic group membership and the distribution of cultural items among populations (Barth, 1969). In his study “Anthropology on the Boundary and the Boundary in Anthropology”, Dan Martin draws a distinction between natural boundaries (seas, deserts, mountains) and artificial boundaries (race, language, trade, religion, war). If natural boundaries were more important for the early period of mankind’s history, artificial boundaries, as Martin states, became more visible in the modern period (Martin, 1990).
In the Recent Period of Anthropology (1980-present) the deconstruction of the colonial ideology became a dogma in the work of many anthropologists, and can be found even in the most successful anthropological textbooks (Otterbein, 1999, Kottak, 2007). The authors of these books are concerned to explain the difference between the motivation and the justification of Colonialism. In a nutshell, the motivation of colonialism is to acquire valuable resources while the justification is to Christianize, to civilize or to teach the primitive people the art of modern politics as they don’t know to lead themselves toward the principles of a modern society. Thus, anthropology became more and more preoccupied to unmask and dissolve the artificial borders that were constructed by people during the history of mankind. In the Recent Period of Anthropology, the idea of boundary started to be analysed in different cultural contexts and from different perspectives. Some authors focus on the idea of political imaginary as it appears in the Communist context. In her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Buck-Morss argues that a “wild zone” is always constructed by the states in order to make a clear distinction between enemy and friends. Thus, the wild zone became an epicenter for channeling the negative energies of the state’s citizens against those that are defined as enemy by the state (Susan Buck-Morss, 2000). In this way the idea of boundary is always present in both the liberal democracies and the totalitarian states which employ this “wild zone of power” in ensuring control, which is an invisible space of aggressive co-optation that legitimates their influence.
After the Second World War, in the Anthropology of Socialism there abound studies that draw dichotomous distinction between: Capitalism versus Communism, the Free World versus Dictatorship, West versus East, U.S.A. versus the Soviet Union. Some other terms like Iron Curtain, class struggle, proletarians, capitalists reinforced in a very striking way idea of a boundary between two very different worlds. During Communism the idea of boundary in the form of censorship was always present in all aspects of people’s life, sometimes even with harsh intrusions into private life (Kligman, 1998).
In the present article I will focus my analysis on a case study: Moldavia Republic. I will try to demonstrate how, during the Postsocialist period the artificial boundaries that were enforced everyday during Communist times are still very visible in the Moldavian society and mark many aspects of the Moldavians’ life: politics, interethnic relations, the reconstruction of their own history, the external relations of the country, the defining of its own borders, the understanding of the self identity and self language of the people.
My Introduction to Moldavian Language
As a native of the Transylvania region, my contact with the Moldavian language was nonexistent for a long period of time, up to the start of my university studies in Philosophy at Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Yet coming from the Jiu Valley, the most important area for coal production in Romania and a region with many immigrants from different corners of the country, I had the chance to speak with people from the Moldavia region of Romania. Their accent was often the subject of jokes and mockery among co-workers as most of them worked at the mine (Grecu, Craciun, Stan, 2002). Their usage of some peculiar words, so-called regionalisms, was described by other inhabitants of the Jiu Valley as being backwards and lacking in education. As Peter Auer observed, drawing linguistic borders between different ethnic groups is a common phenomenon (Auer, 2005). In spite of the fact that they came from the same country, Moldavians were considered a different ethnic group. One of the most important identifying marks was their peculiar accent.
After I began my university studies at Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, I had the chance to meet more students, some of them my colleagues, who came from the Moldavian Republic. For me, as a native speaker of the Romanian language, their language (accent) was quite similar to that of the miners from the Jiu Valley who came from the Moldavian region of Romania. At that time I saw no difference between the so-called Moldavian language and the Moldavian accent of those Romanians coming from Romanian Moldova. I did not realize this until I visited the Moldavian Republic; it was then when I realized that most of the students I met spoke an elite version of the Moldavian language.
My real introduction to the Moldavian language occurred in 2004 when I decided to make a movie in collaboration with Monica Heintz, an anthropologist of Romanian origin who worked at that time for the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. The Moldavian Republic was the country where she conducted her fieldwork research. For me, having more skills in documentary-making, it was a new and exciting experience. Without knowing too many things about this country, I took a train from Bucharest to Chisinau. By chance I was able to talk to an ex-colleague who had become a journalist in Chisinau. Already in the railway station and on the train I began to hear a distinct language that was in some respect different from the language of the students I had met in Cluj-Napoca. There were even Russian words integrated into the language. Because Russian was the first foreign language I had studied in primary and high school, I had some level of comprehension. In spite of that I was able to perfectly understand what people were saying on the street with the exception of when they would switch to Moldavian from Russian, sometimes even in the same phrase. Being surprised by this new aspect of the way people were speaking, I asked my colleague why this occurred so frequently, especially with merchants. He smiled with kindness and told me that in order to understand this problem I also had to understand the last 200 years of the history of this territory and especially to understand the influences of the Soviet period on people’s identities and the politics of the region. This was my first and most important lesson about the Moldavian language.
Actually, by mistake I had arrived in Chisinau one day earlier than Monica, so I spent that evening at Hotel Chisinau, a massive hotel in the downtown section of the city and a relic from the Stalinist period. At the entrance, were two people in costumes who seemed to have no other role than to spy all those who entered the hotel. At the office, I was asked in Russian what I wanted. I replied in Romanian that I only spoke that language and the lady from the office switched to Romanian which she spoke with a deep Russian accent and with many grammar mistakes. I told her I wanted a room for that night and she asked me for my passport. After that she wrote my name in a register and she gave me the key to the room. The price I paid was incredibly high, about 50 Euro. For a second-class hotel from the poorest capital of Europe this was quite a lot. I had my second surprise just one minute later when I asked for my passport back. The lady said she would return it only when I left the hotel. I was extremely unsatisfied with that and I asked her how that was possible. She replied only that this was the rule and there was nothing she could do about it.
That same day I went outside and began to understand the complicated heritage of the Moldavians. In the center of the city was a statue of Stefan the Great, a king of the Moldavian Kingdom in the late Middle Ages and a very important symbol for Romanians as well. I saw a complex monument with the statues of Marx, Lenin and Derjinsky further hidden in a central park. The name of the streets alternated from Romanian names to Russian. Usually the ex-kings of the Moldavian Kingdom like Alexandru cel Bun or Dimitrie Cantemir appeared as street names together with the names of the Russian writers like Puskin, Turgheniev, Gorky. On some buildings I could see other Communist symbols like the Communist star, the hammer and sickle and so on.
After I bought most of the newspapers that were available, including those in Russian, I went back to the hotel and I avidly read all of them. It was thus I found out that there were protests underway in a couple of places in Chisinau, especially at the Radio House. Journalists were protesting against the state attempt to replace the most important journalists who were already working there with other journalists who had been picked based on certain political criteria.
The last notable event of that evening was, in fact, another surprise for me. Around 9:00 p.m. the phone rang in my room and I answered it. A feminine voice addressed me in Russian. I could pick up some of her words, one of which was devuska which means “girl” in the Russian language. I thought she was telling me that Monica, my colleague, had arrived that evening. I was just about to reply through yes, but at the last moment I wanted to be sure I would not commit a mistake so I asked the lady to speak to me in Romanian. I realized that this was a language that she spoke very poorly. Still, I could understand that she wanted to send me a female companion! I thanked her and politely refused. Actually I was quite embarrassed because it was the first such situation that I had encountered in my life and I did not know how to react.
The next morning I met Monica who arrived by train and after checking into the same hotel we went toward the Radio House. Before arriving there we were stopped by an army patrol and asked for our identity cards. Surprisingly, the soldiers addressed us in the Romanian (or Moldavian) language. We told them we had been ordered to leave our passports at the hotel. One of them said that we had to follow them if we did not have identity cards or passports. At that moment Monica panicked. “Why were we asked to leave our passports at the hotel even if we did not want too? What kind of rule is that?” At that moment the second soldier (a sergeant, I supposed) addressed the first soldier: “They are from Romania. They are our brothers! Our brothers! Let them leave!” This is how we were able to continue. At that time we had no particular idea what the topic of our movie would be, but the social protests occurring all around the city over the next few days, plus the people that we met along the way, helped us to make the decision to make a movie about Identities, Nationalism, Protests and Social Movements in a New State.
My first impression walking through Chisinau was that the idea of boundary invades all the time not only the physical space but also the political area as well as the interethnic relations among people. Walking through Chisinau it was like crossing all the time physical, artificial or symbolic borders between at least two different worlds.
Competing identities: drawing and redrawing new boundaries
During our three-month stay in the Moldavian Republic we had the chance to know many people from Chisinau and Cosauti, a village from the north, at the border with Ukraine, where Monica did her research and lived with her family for a year.
For me, the picture of the Moldavian Republic after these three months of research became very complex and striking in many aspects. First of all, I heard a wide range of contradictory opinions about identity, language and the symbols of the national state. Those people with a mixed inter-ethnic heritage and those from Russian families believed themselves and their Moldavian language to be the most relevant and expressive of the Moldavian people, while those who presented themselves as Romanians considered the acknowledgement of the Moldavian language as a manipulation of the Communist Party then in power and a reminiscence of the Soviet heritage. While most were more reserved regarding the Moldavian identity, they nevertheless talked about the Romanian language as the true language of the Moldavian inhabitants. Some other subjects with Russian ancestry claimed that Russian should be the second official language of the country together with Moldavian (Ciscel, 2007, Chapter 5).
Regarding the way people voted, again I witnessed many paradoxes. While most of the people who lived in the countryside were ethnic Moldavians, I expected them to vote for the Christian Party which had a pro-Romanian agenda, or perhaps the Democratic Party which came out with a Moldavian agenda. Yet this was not true. In the countryside the poverty was so profound that many young people emigrated outside the country leaving behind children and older parents. All this made the people feel nostalgic about Communist times when life had been less agitated, more stable and the poverty less severe. Thus, many of the rural inhabitants voted for the Communist Party. This happened in spite of their Moldavian ancestry. Still, in cities like Chisinau or Soroca the elite composed of those with Russian, Ukranian or mixed origin voted more often for the Democratic Party or the Party for Rebirth and Reconciliation instead of voting for the Communist Party. A more detailed explanation of the relationship and boundaries between identities, spoken language and political orientation in Moldova was presented by Dennis Deletant in his article, “Language Policy and Linguistic Trends” (Deletant, 1996).
All of these aspects clearly show that the borders between ethnicity, language, and political orientation were very indistinct. The social-linguistic realities in the Republic of Moldova were sometimes so complicated that they was hard for one to understand. As one of our informants said: “It is hard even for Moldavians themselves to understand what has really happened in their country… Sometimes it is better not to think! So, do you really believe you were the one who will give the final answer? (Vitalie Catana, lawyer, 2004, Monica Heintz & Alin Rus interview).” Another informant gave us a lesson on history: “This territory – it was not even called Bessarabia, it was only called Bessarabia afterwards – did not live in the conditions of a normal statehood for a long period of time. There were always wars on this territory. Either the Turks, or the Russians, then Romanians, again the Turks, again the Russians… this entire situation had a beneficial effect only on the physical aspect of the population. People are tall, healthy, one feels the mixed blood. But, as regards the historical aspects of the problem, for the time being, we should recognize the population of the Moldavian Republic is seriously divided on the question of their identity (Nicolae Andronic, politician, 2005, Monica Heintz & Alin Rus, documentary, ‘This Country… That Other Country’).” The return to history as an ultimate argument for explaining the ethnic, identitarian or linguistic problems was a common attitude for many of our informants: “During the whole period in which Moldova was a Union Republic, hundreds of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Kirkjis and Polish came to Moldova, from all the corners of the Soviet Union. There was a privileged system. Soldiers who did their military service in their twenties had the right to stay. Retired soldiers had the right, at the end of their career, to choose the place they wanted to live. Many chose Moldova and I understood them perfectly. And thus took place a substantial change that can be explained, from an historical and social point of view, of the ethnic composition and consequently of the Moldavian identity (Andrei Popov, political analyst, 2005, Monica Heintz & Alin Rus, documentary ‘This Country… That Other Country’).” Still, there were other informants who used their history for presenting an indubitable argument that Moldova is just Romanian land, the Moldavian language is just an invention and the union with Romania is the only solution for Bessarabian territory to live under normal statehood conditions. We encountered this type of opinion at the Museum of Communist Victims from a group of elders who had been deported in the past to the Soviet Gulag for having “Romanian nationalistic attitudes and principles.” For all those elders who had spent years in the Soviet camps, Russia (but not all Russians!) was the biggest enemy and ethnic peace in the Moldavian Republic could be only provided by a union with Romania, which was a more powerful state that could protect the rights of the Romanians from this area (King, 2000, 151).
All of these divergent opinions challenge the Herderian nationalistic idea of one state, one language, one nation. As Susan Gal stated at the beginning of an article referring to standard language in Europe and its implications, “It is a common sense view held by European elites that languages are organized systems with centrally defined norms, each language ideally expressing the spirit of a nation and the territory it occupies. Monolingualism is seen as natural, with languages separated by limits on mutual intelligibility (Gal, 2006).” For all those researchers who worked in the Moldavian Republic, this “common sense” was strongly challenged. There is no one researcher who can point to the Moldavian identity, language or people and state unequivocally that these are monolithic realities. For this reason the collective volume edited by Monica Heintz and published in 2006 was entitled: “Weak State, Uncertain Citizenship (Heintz, 2006).” In the preface of her volume, Heintz wrote down a question that she asked her informants in the Northern village of Cosauti: “What does it mean to be Moldavian citizen?” The most common answer was to have a blue passport. Or, having a blue passport (Moldavian) means that you do not have a red passport (Romanian) which gives you the possibility to travel toward the West… This is an unsatisfying situation that most of the people try to remediate rather personally than collectively (Heintz, 2006).” It is known that after 1991 the Romanian state offered Romanian passports for all those Moldavians who declared themselves as being Romanians. Still the process of obtaining a Romanian passport was not an easy one. The biggest problem appeared after Romania joined the European Union (January 2007) and then even many ethnic Russians from the Moldavian Republic began to ask for a Romanian passport. They declared themselves Romanians but when they went to the office to apply for a passport they could not say one word in Romanian. How can this situation be explained? One good explanation is offered by Matthew Ciscel who observed that at least in the big cities like Chisinau the language of prestige is Russian: “When spoken to in Russian, a typical Romanian speaker will respond in Russian, particularly when there is business at hand. But in the central market with its many rural and lower-class vendors, it is most likely a monolingual Russian speaker would respond to Romanian with Russian (Ciscel, 2007, 30).” This is something that I noticed as well when I went to buy wine from a kiosk in the open market. I asked for wine a couple of times and although I was the first in line the seller served those people behind me who spoke Russian. At the end she asked me in Russian what did I want? When I asked for wine in Romanian she gave me the wine while giving me a dirty face and without saying a word. Did she know any Romanian or she was just a Russian nationalist? These types of dilemmas appear all the time in the linguistic markets of Chisinau. One of our informants, Andrei Popov, a bilingual speaker, even told us an interesting and quite impressive story about these types of interactions. An old woman once asked him on a street where a specific location could be found. She addressed him in Russian but he replied in Romanian expecting her to switch languages. Yet she did not switch, continuing to ask in Russian. He stubbornly continued to answer in Romanian. After a while the woman left very upset. The same evening he told that story to some friends and he found out by chance that the old woman had asked for Cemetery Street. She was a Russian lady coming from Moscow because her son who lived in Chisinau had died two days before and she had come there for the funeral.
In spite of these tensions and emotional dilemmas, the Russian language remained the most prestigious language on the streets of Chisinau. This was a heritage of the Communist times when only Russian was the official language of the Moldavian Soviet Republic, while the Moldavian language was rather a language spoken at home or among friends. Only after 1989 when the big wave of nationalistic movements began all over the Soviet State was the Moldavian language imposed as an official language too. Moldavian became “the first” language after August 1991 when the Moldavian Republic became independent. Still, this status of first language became highly disputed and the lines blurred. While in the countryside people spoke mainly Moldavian, in the big cities Russian still played the most important role. Again, the Soviet heritage explains a lot. Between 1918-1940 Bessarabia was united with Romania. Romanian became the official language and the Russian language had a secondary role. Still, this entire period was full of convulsions and repeated threats from Russia against Romania. In 1924 an irredentist Bolshevik group tried to instigate a social revolt at Tatar-Bunar, a Romanian locality from Moldova at the border with Russia. The attack was repressed by the Romanian army and the Communist Party became banned by law. In the meantime, the Soviet power created the M.S.S. Republic at the border with Romania. The linguist Leonid Madam (through some political order) was charged with the creation of a “new language” completely different from Romanian, which is the Moldavian language. Through “irrefutable” arguments the Soviet linguist “proved” that the Romanian and Moldavian languages are different. All of this happened at the new Soviet Republic at the border with Romania. This Soviet Republic is called Transnistria today and it is a separatist republic inside of the weakened Moldavian state (Colesnic-Codreanca, 2003, King, 2002); During the Second World War the Soviet army (re)conquered Bessarabia from Romania and transformed this territory into a Soviet Republic – the Moldavian Soviet Republic. Thousands of Romanians were deported from this Soviet Republic to the Gulag under the accusation of nationalism and anti-Soviet propaganda. Today at the small Museum of Communist Victims in Chisinau there are many pictures and documents about those who were deported. Most impressive is the story of a group of twelve-year old children who were sent to the Gulag together with their educator after being accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and irredentism. This last Soviet period was very important for the creation of new identities in this state. The Soviet power sent many officials from Moscow and other Soviet cities and gave them important positions in the Moldavian capital and some of the other big cities. The population of Romanian ethnic origin was marginalized. The Moldavian language was the only accepted syntax of those times. Nevertheless, the Soviet “democratic power” did allow this language to be taught in schools, but they replaced the Latin characters of the Moldavian language with Cyrillic characters (Dyer, 1996).
In the Soviet Republic of Moldova the Moscow leaders sent only Russian people to work in the administration. They had the privileged position as leaders of the institutions, factories, in the army or as local political figures. This idea was explained by Lenore A. Grenoble: “Thus the Soviet government began a campaign to create a Moldavian ethnic identity and, as a central part of that identity, a Moldavian language, distinct from ethnic Romanians and the Romanian language. Yet this attitude was not without its difficulties. While the official policy was that the Moldavians were a separate nationality, this sense of identity had to be created and supported. This was a very regional policy, limited to Moldova, which was formulated in an attempt to create distance from Romania (Grenoble, 2003, 90).”
Those Moldavians who wanted to acquire important privileges had to prove total devotion to Soviet politics and its leaders. Under these conditions the Moldavian population who spoke only Romanian (during that time it was called Moldavian) were condemned to work in the countryside having only the poorest jobs in the so-called kolhoz or Collective State Farms. Thus, most of the population who claim Romanian roots were condemned to be marginalized while those who achieved good positions were either Russians or opportunists. Or perhaps this was just another effect of the imperial politics in this small republic: “Under the Soviets denial of Moldavian ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity with the Romanians was based on an attempt to create the most artificial nationality of the USSR, the Moldavians, and to thus hide the fact that over 2.8 million Romanians lived under Soviet rule in a territory that once was part of the ethnic Romanian principality of Moldova (Deletant, 1996, 54).”
This entire picture gives us only a blurry representation of why everything is so complicated in the Republic of Moldova. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital struggle (Bourdieu, 1991) can explain a lot here. Different groups are in competition with each other and they try to maximize their resources in different contexts. Language can be seen as a tool surrounded by power relations. Daniel Nettle and Suzane Romaine explain: “Signs carry a lot of symbolic freight. They do more than identify places and things. They reveal social hierarchies… Languages and language varieties are always in competition, and at times in conflict (Nettle & Romaine, 2000, 20-21).”
Thus, being a monolingual speaker in a blurred context like that of the Moldavian Republic can be a disadvantage, although being a fluent bilingual speaker does not yet solve the problem. During my fieldwork research I spoke with many people who fluently spoke two languages (Romanian and Russian). Nevertheless, when they arrive at a point where they are asked to decide regarding their identity, many times most of these people gave emotional answers. Many of them considered one of these two languages a part of their identity while the second language as just a tool that can maximize their role in the economic market. This is because the question of identity still remains and, as we know, identity is not only about interests, but also about feelings.
As we can see from this entire context, the relations between power, language and ideology are present at all times. A specific ideology within a specific period of time can be used as a means for imposing a given language at a certain time. By imposing a language in a certain context, it involves the interests of a specific ethnic group. So, imposing a language is, in fact, a subtle way to access resources in a modern society.
During Communism, Russian was the queen of the languages in the Soviet Republic of Moldova. So, those who came from Russia and spoke the Russian language automatically gained a privileged status. Less privileged was the Moldavian language, together with the languages of other minorities of this Soviet Republic such as Gagauz or Ukrainian. Those who were monolingual in those languages were condemned to be excluded from the elite set. Still, the marginalization of an ethnic group on the economic market and a language on the linguistic market does not always have the expected result. Marginalizing a group makes it more aware of its self-consciousness. Also, the resentment of that group against its oppressors will make that ethnic group more prone toward extreme actions as soon as it has a favorable opportunity.
Still the economic changes like those that happened after the Soviet Union collapse can have a big role in shaping the interethnic landscape, language politics and the continuous redrawing of new boundaries among people. Thus, after the degradation of the economic situation in the Moldavian Republic, which happened mainly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the Moldavians expected the Romanian state to do much more for them and their country. Nevertheless, Romania itself was a poor country. With a centralized economy during Ceausescu’s time and many “mammoth unproductive factories” inherited from that time which collapsed one by one after 1989, Romania did not have too much to offer (Tanase, 1999). The gates of the Romanian universities were largely opened for Moldavian students and some economic and cultural exchanges began. Yet Romania could not compare with the more massive Russian market that Moldova had lost after showing its nationalistic and Pan-Romanian tendencies. Also, many of those Moldavians who had direct experiences with the Romanian culture and life went back to Moldova full of resentment and bad feelings. In spite of being identified as Romanian heroes by Romanian people, they had the surprise to be identified as Russians after crossing the border with Romania. These people changed their attitude from a Pan-Romanianism view to a pro-Moldavian identity. This was not only valid for common people and students, but also for politicians like Mircea Snegur, the first president of Moldova after 1991: “In the past, Snegur had been careful to distance himself from the Moldavianianism of the most radical Agrarians, a view of Moldavian-Romanian separateness that contained uncomfortable echoes of the Soviet policy discredited in 1989. While denying the possibility of political union, Snegur previously had spoken approvingly of the Romanian heritage of the Moldavian state and the need for closer cultural and economic integration with Bucharest. In his Our Home speech (February, 1994), however, his views were unequivocal. Snegur denounced the pan-Romanian message as a betrayal and accused Moldova’s writers and historians of doubting the legitimacy and historical foundation of our right to be a state, to call ourselves the Moldavian people (King, 2000, 155).”
These situations exemplify one more time the complicated Communist heritage left in Moldavia Republic by the Soviet Union together with the dramatic economic changes after 1991, which determined people to change and re-change their attitude toward politics, some other ethnic groups, language and identity. This means a continuous reshaping and recreation of the boundaries among people and between their country and its neighbors.
Conclusions
Today in Anthropology the idea of boundary is widely discussed and used in many articles and books. Usually anthropologists distinguish between natural and artificial boundaries. In Moldavia Republic, a country where geographical borders changed all the time during the last century, the artificial boundaries among people have been created and recreated at an incredible speed over the past years. The Soviet Communist ideology and its heritage played a big role after the creation of a new state (Moldavia Republic), with a new identity for its citizens, a new language and new symbols.
The tense geo-political situation, the collapse of the fragile Moldavian economy after 1991 and its agitated history, which became a burdensome heritage for the new state, played a big role in drawing artificial boundaries between “two languages” that are practically similar: Romanian and Moldavian. The same artificial distinction has been applied when drawing deep boundaries between the two ethnic groups of this new state: Moldavians and Romanians. This situation expresses not only a complicated heritage but also the weakness of the ideology of boundaries.
Also, the idea of competing identities can explain here a lot. The ethnic group of Russians was a privileged one during Communist times. Still, after 1991 this group started to lose its privileges and advantages. Thus, their resistance for maintaining the Russian language in inter-human communication in Moldavia is not just a simple caprice. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital struggle (Bourdieu, 1991) can explain a lot here. Different groups are in competition with each other and they try to maximize their resources in different contexts. Language is a tool, surrounded by power relations, which can give people the possibility to access valuable resources.
Languages and language varieties are always in competition, and at times in conflict. As we can see from this entire context the relations between power, language and ideology are present at all times. A specific ideology within a specific period of time can be used as a means for imposing a given language at a certain time. Or, by imposing a language in a certain context, it involves the interests of a specific ethnic group. So, imposing a language is, in fact, a subtle way to access resources in a modern society. Thus, an ideology of linguistic boundaries that can be seen as artificial or even absurd at the first glance, actually hide power relations between different groups in conflict that tries to maximize their profit and to access valuable resources.
Borrowing an idea from Benedict Anderson (Anderson, 2006) we can notice the philosophical poverty and incoherence of the ideology of boundaries and language politics, which goes hand in hand with its incredible power and harshness in some concrete situations. The entire situation in Moldavia Republic proves that an ideology which is not necessary has to be coherent in order to be effective.
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