Charles King’s The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, published by the Hoover Institution Press (January 2000), was awarded the American Romanian Academy of Arts & Sciences’ annual book award for an outstanding work on Romania.
The Moldovans is part of the Hoover Institution Press’s acclaimed Studies of Nationalities series. The series examines the histories of the principal nationalities in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It explores issues of identity and conflict, political and social organization, and modernization.
King, an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University, has written the first English-language book to present a comprehensive picture of the political, cultural, and ethnic issues that have shaped the East European borderland.
Questions of cultural identity and political independence have long been divisive for the Moldovans. Although desiring separateness, they have historically been considered an “offshoot of the Romanians” because of similarities in dialect. Reflecting this, the Moldovans have been torn in their loyalties, developing tangled allegiances over time. As a result, attempts to establish a separate state have often failed, undermined by divisions among their own.
Not until 1991, in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, was an independent Moldova established. As King points out, however, the young Moldovan state has existed in a strange twilight—politically independent but culturally tied to its Romanian brethren.
King’s exploration of this dichotomy is tied to larger questions about the ability of political elites to manipulate the identity of a people, as national powers in the region—Russians and Romanians—have fought for control of the Moldovans.
Today, the question of Moldovan identity remains open-ended: “The idea of the Moldovans as a distinct nation in the normal sense of the term, is . . . problematic,” writes King, complicated by the “mutable, multiple, overlapping, and often inconsistent” nature of ethnicity and nationalism.
It is the “unsettled nature of the essentials of nationality” that is at the crux of the Moldovan dilemma.
Charles King, also holds the Ion Ratiu Chair of Romanian Studies at Georgetown.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs.
