Americans struggle with geography and history. Largely
ignorant of their own, they soon all but drown when delving into regions such
as Central and Eastern Europe. Our education system and media do not help and
to some degree I think this ignorance is deliberate. And yet if you want to
understand what's happening geopolitically and what it means for the world at
large and for the Christians living in these places, it's good to investigate
these matters.
Perhaps you've watched some media pieces on Transnistria or
the NATO missile bases being placed in Romania. Why are these things happening
and why are some people upset about it? For the American audience everything is
viewed through a post 9/11 and pro-America lens and yet for the people outside
the United States this is not the case.
Occasionally Romania makes it into Western news coverage.
Anti-corruption protests, election disputes, the NATO presence and Vladimir
Putin dominate the little coverage there is of the region. And yet there is
another issue simmering that should be considered. It's confusing for many
because it involves Romania and its neighbour Moldova. This becomes even more
confusing because Romania's easternmost region is called Moldavia. Some will already
be confused. If you want to understand, get a map out, preferably one in an
atlas, not one that erases names as you zoom out.
Don't confuse Moldova and Moldavia. They're actually
historically connected but these contested lands are at present divided between
two nations. Moldavia a former principality is today a region within Romania,
the largest city being Iași
or 'Yash' as it's pronounced. Neighbouring Moldova is an independent country with
its capital at Chișinău, and yet its population is divided between Romanian speakers (culturally
connected to neighbouring Romanian Moldavia) and its Slavs with their 19th
century connections to the Russian Empire, lands that are today in the Ukraine.
Long a vassal state of the Ottomans the area was ceded to the
Russian Empire in the early 19th century but became an object of
contention when the western part of
the larger principality of Moldavia (which included today's Moldova) broke off
and joined with Wallachia to form the modern state of Romania. This is further
confused by the fact that under Russian control the eastern region of Moldavia
(comprised mainly of today's Moldova) was known as Bessarabia, named after the
once dominant House of Basarab . This entire region would bounce back and forth
between Tsarist Russia and the new state of Romania throughout the latter parts
of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. It's
complicated and today's maps don't accurately reflect the nuances and the
trade-offs between regions and sub-regions. To keep things simple I'm avoiding
discussion of Dobruja, Budjak, Bukovina etc. It just becomes too complicated.
The Russian Revolution afforded Romania the opportunity to
once more seize these eastern Moldavian lands (Moldova/Bessarabia) which they viewed
as part of their larger state and cultural heritage only to see them annexed by
Stalin. Romania under the quasi-fascist Ion Antonescu joined Hitler in
Operation Barbarossa in no small part to recapture these lands only to see them
lost once more to the Soviet Union by the end of the war.
Now nearly thirty years after the collapse of the USSR,
Romania (this time connected to the EU and NATO) is once again considering re-appropriating
Eastern Moldavia (Moldova-Bessarabia) into its fold. But this time it's
different. Bucharest is not acting alone and such moves are connected to a
larger story and history.
It's also different, it could be argued because Moldova is
not under Russian control, though a tiny sliver of the country, Transnistria on
the eastern side of the Dniester River is nominally under Moscow's control. The
Russian appropriation of this enclave (Transnistria) in the 1990's was a
desperate attempt by Moscow to keep a foothold on this long contested region.
While failing to control what is to them Bessarabia, Moscow has clearly
signalled they do not want the region to fall into the hands of Romania and in
light of Bucharest's contemporary relationships... NATO and the West. Moscow
has been content to leave Moldova as autonomous, even while controlling their
Transnistria enclave but for Romania to annex the whole nation would not only
generate a crisis with regard to Transnistria (ostensibly part of Moldova) it
would be an assault on what Russia views as its historical sphere.
Ostsiedlung refers to the German expansion(or
settlement) to the east, a process which began in Middle Ages and continued
until about the 18th century. My own family was part of this. One
branch, my paternal grandmother's family were Volga Germans who settled in
today's Saratov Oblast near the Kazakh border in the 18th century.
By the time they left around the turn of the 20th century their
German incorporated a host of Russian terms, they drank vodka instead of
schnapps and sung their German folk songs on the balalaika.
For centuries Germans lived in scattered communities
throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The largely homogeneous nations of today
did not exist. This reality was largely (but not entirely) reversed in the wake
of 1945 when the majority of Germans were often violently forced out and repatriated
to country(s) (Germany and after 1949,West and East Germany) that didn't exist
when their ancestors left in previous centuries. Remember, Germany only became
a unified nation in 1871 and of course it was divided once more in 1945. And of
those who remained in the East, many would voluntarily migrate during the Cold
War and its aftermath.
Drang nach osten is another expression, one more aggressive
and associated with 19th century German nationalism and would later
merge into the Lebensraum concept
advocated by the Third Reich. This notion was more reminiscent of the ethos of
the Teutonic Knights and was associated with conquest and Germanisation. The
story of German settlement in the East is one of different motivations.
Sometimes people (like my ancestors) were trying to escape war, conscription
and taxation and were looking for economic opportunities and this motivated
them to leave the German lands of Central Europe. In other cases there were
deliberate attempts to colonise. 19th century nationalism combined a
desire for land and resources with contempt for the Slavic peoples, all woven
together into a semi-mythological narrative of German origins.
Romania's potential expansion is not a German expansion per
se but in many ways the EU and NATO constructs represent a modern version of
the German dominated Holy Roman Empire and a direct challenge to Eastern
Orthodoxy and the heritage of Byzantium. The Holy Roman Empire was also
something more than merely German and these various medieval and early modern
expansions to the east, while overwhelmingly German were not exclusively so. To
be fair, the EU was never meant to reconstitute the Holy Roman Empire and
contrary to Dispensationalist fantasies, it's not the old Roman Empire either.
And yet, the history is there and over the past decade many have begun to
grumble as the German dominance of the EU has become more of a reality. We're a
long way from Charlemagne but maybe not so far from Bismarck and the
aspirations of historic German nationalism. Right now the French are on board
and partners with Berlin which of course defies any historic parallelism, and
yet they too have a history in the region, especially with regard to Romania.
The analogies are never exact but the memories are there, especially for the
people of Eastern Europe, the very people so long trapped between the imperial
aspirations of German (and Austrian) dominated Central Europe, Russia and at
one time the empires of Polish-Lithuania and Ottoman Turkey.
Romania is in many ways thinking in irredentist terms, seeking
to recapture historic and cultural lands but such moves are not in isolation
and that's why the historical question and context is paramount in this case.
Romania is effectively part of the New Holy Roman Empire and as such its moves
are against the Orthodox world.* This is complicated as Romania is effectively
an Orthodox state but it has (much like Greece) since the 19th
century danced between the two worlds. Like the Greeks the Romanians are not Slavic
though Slavic blood and culture surely flows through their veins. From the standpoint of some Slavophile and
Orthodox thinkers, the Romanians are traitors, not to be trusted. They have
tasted the wines of the West so to speak and have adulterated themselves.
Of course post WWI, Romania incorporated Transylvania and
despite its associations with the mysterious east, it (Transylvania) is really
part of Central Europe. For centuries it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary and
its cultural influences are more closely wed to Budapest and Habsburg Vienna
than Constantinople or Moscow. This merely adds to the cultural intensity and
contradiction found in a nation like Romania. It's pertinent because Hungary
and Romania remain less than friendly and if Putin wants to move against
Bucharest, he may find a friend in Hungary's Viktor Orban.
Those that think the old fires are out had better think
again. Beneath that pile of historical ashes there are still live coals that
can be rekindled. Romania's position vis-à-vis Hungary and possibly Russia put
it in a position that is controversial and possibly tenuous.
Few knew it at the time but during the Cold War the border
between Hungary and Romania was said to be worse than crossing from West to
East Berlin. Though both states were part of the Eastern Bloc and fellow
members of the Warsaw Pact the historical animosity was potent and ever
present. The Hungarians are still stewing about what happened to them at the
end of WWI. Their participation in WWII, their alliance with Hitler and their
own fascist history are in large part shaped by this story.
The notion that Romania would annex or in some other way incorporate
Moldova not only kindles nationalist and historical fires but it plays into the
larger narrative of East vs. West, Catholic vs. Orthodox and in light of the EU
and NATO, Latin/German vs. the Orthodox and Slavic world.
The fact that the Soros Foundation is involved in these
matters hasn't helped. It's understood as a proxy for Western imperialism and
additionally the Moldovan civil unrest that broke out in 2009 was believed by
many to have been fostered and fomented by Bucharest, which also points back to
NATO.
Again, Romania is neither German nor Roman Catholic but since
the first decade of the 2000's Bucharest has joined with both NATO and the EU
thus aligning it with Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London and Washington. For some
this represents a historical deviation for the Eastern European nation, a complete break with its history and
heritage. Westernisers view this is a positive move, an embrace of modernity, a
mark of maturity. Others are not so sure and just a decade later Romania, now
hosting NATO missile bases and taking up the position of a frontline state vis-à-vis
Russia is being forced to do a little soul searching. For the Slavophiles and
devoted Orthodox this move by Romania is a sequel, a repeat of the 19th
century. For them Romanian unification in the 1860's was a project of
treachery, Western scheming and colonisation. Napoleon III played a
considerable role in the project and in Romania's 'corruption'. It led to all
the troubles between Romania and Russia and all the present tensions are the
result of The West (Brussels and Washington) pushing east and attempting to
complete the project lost to them in the wake of World War II.
Romania was one of several modern nations that sat for
centuries under Turkish rule and experienced liberation in the 19th
century. Fueled by romantic nationalism and sponsored by other European states,
the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia united in the 1860's and
would eventually become Romania. Russia was the hero state to these Orthodox
nations of the Balkans and certainly to the Slavs. And yet Romania would soon
break with the Tsar over the lands that sit adjacent to the Black Sea, the
region that is today the borderlands of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. Again
from the Russian perspective this deviation was due to Romania's flirtations
with the West, especially France. Every Orthodox capital should be a version of
Constantinople, a holy city, seat of an Orthodox primate and yet in the 19th
and early 20th centuries Bucharest became the 'Paris of the East', a
place of decadence and from the Orthodox perspective, apostasy.
The border region represented by Moldova/Bessarabia has never
really settled down into a peaceful or politically stable state of affairs with
the exception of the Soviet interlude. As the Soviet Union broke up in the
early 1990's, what could be called a Slavic faction developed in Moldova.
Sponsored by Moscow to be sure they effectively created an autonomous nation in
the east of Moldova, just across the Dniester River, the previously mentioned Transnistria
with its capital at Tiraspol. A brief war broke out in 1992 and was in reality
a proxy war between Bucharest and at the time a very weak Moscow. Transnistria,
a tiny sliver of a state wedged between Moldova and Ukraine was formed and
though not recognised by anyone apart from Moscow and a few of its satrapies,
it represents the fact that history has not gone away.
Who has the legitimate claim? This is to delve into the
labyrinthine enigma that is Central and Eastern European history. One must
wrestle with not only the modern nation states but cultural identities,
ethnicities and historical crimes. Does Russia have a legitimate claim? Does
Romania? What is Romania? What is Ukraine? Do 19th century treaties
between empires still matter? Is nationalism legitimate, especially in Eastern
Europe?
There are no good answers and yet many myths are generated
and narratives that can be used by other powers.
The West can paint Romanian-Moldovan unification as a win-win,
an anti-Balkanisation move that will benefit the people of Moldova, tie in gas
pipelines and strengthen both the borders and economy of the EU. Additionally
it will bring Ukraine that much closer to EU and NATO interests.
Of course from Moscow's perspective this is rank imperialism
an EU version of Ostsiedlung, cultural conquest and a military threat.
The bulk of the Moldovan population isn't interested and
obviously no one in Transnistria wants anything to do with it. This is
Bucharest, Brussels and potentially Kiev attempting to play with fire... egged
on by Washington. Many are just looking for an excuse to move against Moscow.
Many think the spark will occur in the Baltic States, some in the Balkans. It
may happen on the western edges of the steppe in fields that were once the
bloodlands of World War II.
Many ignore the lessons of history and the progressive
mindset that dominates Western thought (so-called conservative or otherwise)
would do well to pause and consider the lessons of history. Many Western
strategists think the past doesn't matter in light of 21st century
paradigms but they're wrong, especially when it comes to the East.
Whatever the formal justification, this talk of
Romanian-Moldovan reunification, itself something of a historical myth is
little more than the EU and NATO continuing their move toward the Ukraine and
the Caucasus and Moscow knows this all too well.
* Of course Ukraine represents the contradictions of the
region. The country is split between a Russian dominated Orthodox east and the
West which considers itself part of Europe. This is reflected even in the
Uniate and Eastern Rite Roman Catholic Churches which are found there. Loyal to
the Pope, these Roman Catholic Churches utilise the Byzantine Rite (icons etc.)
and pepper the regions of Western Ukraine and the frontier where the modern
borders of Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine come together.
This is but another chapter of treachery from the Orthodox
perspective. Utilising the failed reunification frameworks established in the
15th century as the desperate Byzantines sought help from the West,
the Catholic Church continued a policy of appropriation in the following
centuries and under the auspices of Polish-Lithuania, Hungary and the Habsburgs
continued to bring Orthodox peoples into the Roman Catholic fold. There is
great bitterness over this which continues to the present day and has
contributed to the divisions in Ukrainian society.