FAKE NEWS: Romania does not recognize “the Moldovan language”, and this shows that it carries out an expansionist policy

Romania does not recognize the existence of a “Moldovan language” and this proves that it seeks to absorb territories, the Socialists in the Republic of Moldova say. The theory on the Romanian “threat” is being reactivated in the context of the election campaign in Chisinau, after Bucharest asked Ukraine to admit that there was no Moldovan language, but a mere political invention used for expansionist purposes by the USSR.

NEWS: “PSRM expresses its indignation at the statement made by the Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bogdan Aurescu, who, during a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, asked Ukraine to recognize the Moldovan language as “non-existent””.

“By making such statements, the official representatives of Romania have removed the mask of respectability, showing the true face of the official Bucharest. These statements, along with the scandalous chauvinist actions of the AUR movement and other unionist forces in Moldova, are evidence of the long-term strategy to absorb the independent Republic of Moldova. The Party of Socialists calls on the Romanian leadership to apologize officially and to disavow the statements of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and of the Ambassador of Romania to the Republic of Moldova. We perceive such statements as hostile and offensive to the Moldovan people and the Moldovan language. We remind you that the ethnonym “Moldovan people” and the phrase “Moldovan language” appeared a few centuries earlier than the definitions of “Romanian people” and “Romanian language””, the PSRM communiqué reads.

This is actually not the first offensive statement by Romanian officials against the Republic of Moldova. Recently, the Romanian ambassador to Moldova, Daniel Ioniță, has stated that the citizens of our country should be “vaccinated against primitive Moldovenism”, reads the website of the NTV station, affiliated with PSRM.

NARRATIVES: 1. The “Moldovan language” is older than the Romanian language, just like  the Moldovan people compared to the Romanian one and both are different. 2. Romania wants to swallow the Republic of Moldova.

CONTEXT / LOCAL ETHOS: In a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmitro Kuleba, the Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu said that Romania supported Kiev's EU and NATO aspirations and called on Ukraine to officially state that there was no “Moldovan language”.

Ukraine recognizes as separate the Romanian and Moldovan minorities on its territory, as well as two separate languages in their case. Together, the two minorities would make up the largest ethnic community in Ukraine, after the Russian one.

In fact, Kiev has maintained this ethnic dichotomy for decades. Legally, Kiev relies on Article 13 of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova regarding the name of the language. In parallel, on a smaller scale, Bucharest does the same with Ukrainians and Ruthenians in Romania, numbering about 66,000 people, while the Romanian and Moldovan minorities in Ukraine gather over 400,000 citizens.

The two groups are concentrated in northern Bukovina and southern Bessarabia, regions that were annexed by the USSR initially following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and later after World War II, and which were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. The theory on the existence of a Moldovan people and language was used by the USSR to promote its political agenda (achieving the expansionist policy of the USSR, since its inception, to the detriment of the Kingdom of Romania). The theories that seek to present Romania as an expansionist and aggressor state also date from the USSR period, and they have been also used after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, both in the Republic of Moldova and in Ukraine.

A good part of PSRM's campaign rhetoric focuses on Romania and tries to revive the phobias about a virtual union and hidden intentions of Bucharest with regard to the Republic of Moldova. The PSRM led by the former pro-Russian president Igor Dodon is focusing on anti-Romanian campaign themes and is trying to associate and describe the presence of AUR in these parliamentary elections due in Chisinau on July 11, as one of Romania’s hidden projects.

PURPOSE:  To instrumentalize history and linguistics as political weapons, especially during election campaigns, in order to artificially create fears and division among society.

WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: PSRM, and in general, the representatives of Moldovenism, who promote the lack of a historical-cultural and linguistic connection between the citizens of Romania and the Republic of Moldova, use sophistry related to the chronology of Romania's emergence as a state, in order to falsely demonstrate that Romania is much younger than the medieval Moldavia ruled by Stephen the Great.

The idea of ​​a distinction between Romanians and Moldovans appeared during the Tsarist Empire, in the early 20th century, and became state policy after 1924, when the Soviet Union created the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (RASSM), today the Transnistrian separatist region, as a bridgehead for the export of the Socialist revolution (and implicitly the expansion of the USSR) towards Romania and, further, into the Balkans.

 After a short period in the 1930s, when the project was abandoned amid Stalin's attempts to export the socialist revolution to Romania, after the annexation of Bessarabia in the late 1940s, Moscow resumed its segregation practices regarding the “Moldovan language”. The Romanian words in Latin spelling were replaced by those in Cyrillic spelling, which enshrined the existence of the Moldovan language.

From a legal point of view, on December 5, 2013, the Constitutional Court in Chisinau ruled that Romanian is the official language spoken in the Republic of Moldova.

The Court judges granted the status of constitutional norm to the Declaration of Independence of the country, adopted in 1991, in which the Romanian language is proclaimed the state language, and which prevails even over the amended Constitution, which stipulates in Article 13 that “the Moldovan language” is spoken in the Republic of Moldova.

“The Declaration of Independence constitutes the legal and political foundation of the Constitution, so that no provision of the latter can go beyond the framework of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, the Court found that, in case of divergences between the text of the Declaration of Independence and the text of the Constitution, the primary constitutional text of the Declaration of Independence shall prevail”, the Constitutional Court’s Decision reads, a decision that the political class in Chisinau has never observed, thus violating the law.

Also, the Board of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova decided on September 9, 1994 that the correct name of the language is “Romanian language”.

“Although the term Moldovan language was used in some medieval historical sources, scholars of the time understood by this name a subdialect of the common Romanian language, realizing perfectly well the Romanian language unity throughout the Dacian-Romanian territory (“The inhabitants of Wallachia and Transylvania have the same language as Moldovans ...”; We, Moldovans, also call ourselves Romanians, and our language is not Dacian, nor Moldovan, but Romanian” - Dimitrie Cantemir;  “Moldovans do not ask, «Do you speak Moldovan?», but «do you speak Romanian?» - Miron Costin)

[…] So, in the Republic of Moldova we can talk about a Moldovan dialect. Moldovan can be called the oral (dialectal) idiom here. The Moldovan specificity of the Romanian language spoken in historical Moldavia can be talked about. But one cannot speak of a Moldovan literary, written, cultural “language”. The replacement of the terms cannot be accepted even if a part of the population, by virtue of specific local traditions, has used and still uses, non-terminologically, the phrase “Moldovan language”, the decision of the academics in Chisinau reads.

With regard to Romania's alleged expansionist intentions, Bucharest has never pursued the annexation of the Republic of Moldova, and such ideas cannot be found even in the mainstream political discourse. Moreover, Romania was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Moldova, and, since joining the European Union, it has been Chisinau's main advocate in Brussels. As for Ukraine, Romania signed a border treaty with that country (which excludes territorial claims) as early as 1997.