Weak State Uncertain Citizenship Moldova

Definitions of citizenship often lack a solid grounding in the lived realities of ordinary citizens. They tend instead to focus on the debates of elites and on geopolitical processes. Citizenship in the postsocialist context defies the narrow definitions given by political elites, primarily because representatives of the state have been unable to guarantee the 'social rights' that citizens expect. This volume seeks to provide information by looking both at the making of citizenship from above and at the perceptions and responses of citizens from below. How citizens conceive of their relations to the state determines their involvement (or lack of involvement) in public life, including voting and participation in social movements. It also determines whether or not they will seek an alternative citizenship, and their attitudes towards ethnic conflicts. It follows that the possibilities of citizenship offered by postsocialist Moldova constitute a vital factor in addressing the political, economic, and social difficulties which this young state faces.

National identity in Moldova remains contested despite repeated attempts by governments, historians, and educators to cultivate a shared sense of national belonging through the development of history textbooks. Concern over professional status and distrust of the government’s motivations halted these reforms, demonstrating that the success of such efforts greatly depends on teachers’ and citizens’ social memory and everyday lives. This volume looks at educational reform and the struggle over national identity in the history classroom from the perspectives of five different groups: elected politicians, Ministry of Education officials, textbook authors and historians, teachers, and students. Each chapter explores the actors’ motivations and agendas regarding reform, their role in promoting or obstructing the reform process, and their opinions about the ensuing controversy. Drawing on months of fieldwork and original research, author Elizabeth Worden examines the importance of teachers and students in the success or failure of a reform initiative.

Why, when and where are some moral systems supported and followed whilst others are condemned? Are moral values culturally relative or universal? Can immoral actions be tolerated in times of crisis? Is the dream of becoming better sufficient for prompting virtuous behavior, or should we dream about what is best? Do moral values last? The divergence in practices and codes of moral belief and action present significant challenges but also offer opportunities to anthropologists for understanding social life. In this book, Monica Heintz explores these questions, drawing on case studies from Eastern Europe that encompass migration, religion, economic and social policies and paying particular attention to the way morality works in communities undergoing rapid social change. She uses these examples to reflect on the wider question of societal conflict and change, showing how they are driven by moral values. By highlighting the centrality of such values as engines for action and questioning the limits of universal moral values, she argues that anthropology has the capacity to shed light on the study of human morality more generally. The Anthropology of Morality: A Dynamic and Interactionist Approach will be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, as well as those in politics and sociology with an interest in European politics.

In Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the last decades. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting citizenship to—or passportizing—large numbers in Crimea. Both are regions with kin majorities: local majorities claimed as co-ethnic by external states offering citizenship, among other benefits. As functioning citizens of the states in which they reside, kin majorities do not need to acquire citizenship from an external state. Yet many do so in high numbers. Kin Majorities explores why these communities engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm. Perhaps surprisingly, the discourse and practice of Russian citizenship was largely absent in Crimea before annexation. Comparing the situation in Crimea with the strong presence of Romanian citizenship in Moldova, Knott explores two rarely researched cases from the ground up, shedding light on why Romanian citizenship was more prevalent and popular in Moldova than Russian citizenship in Crimea, and to what extent identity helps explain the difference. Kin Majorities offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on how citizenship interacts with cross-border and local identities, with crucial implications for the politics of geography, nation, and kin-states, as well as broader understandings of post-Soviet politics.

Der englischsprachige Band bietet einen Überblick über die Entwicklungen im Bereich historischer Bildung in den Nachfolgestaaten Jugoslawiens und der Republik Moldova seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre bis heute. Ausgangspunkt aller Beiträge ist der Nations- und Staatsbildungsprozess mit seinen Auswirkungen auf Geschichtspolitik und Schule im Rahmen eines ermutigenden, aber auch widersprüchlichen Transformationsprozesses. Ergänzend wird die Rolle der in der Region international agierenden Bildungsakteure und -institutionen untersucht. Unter welchen Voraussetzungen und mit welchen Mitteln Reformen und Interventionen im Bildungsbereich nachhaltig wirken können, in welche Richtung sich historische Narrationen entwickeln – diese und ähnliche Fragen sucht der Band zu beantworten. Er erlaubt aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive Einblicke in die komplexen Transformationen des Bildungssektors in Südosteuropa.

This edited volume provides an innovative contribution to the debate on contemporary European geopolitics by tracing some of the new political geographies and geographical imaginations emergent within - and made possible by - the EU's actions in the international arena. Drawing on case studies that range from the Arctic to East Africa, the nine empirical chapters provide a critical geopolitical reading of the ways in which particular places, countries, and regions are brought into the EU's orbit and the ways in which they are made to work for 'EU'rope. The analyses look at how the spaces of 'EU'ropean power and actorness are narrated and created, but also at how 'EU'rope's discursive (and material) strategies of incorporation are differently appropriated by local and regional elites, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The question of EU border management is a particularly important concern of several contributions, highlighting some of the ways in which the Union's border-work is actively (re)making the European space.

Bessarabia?mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova?was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ?symbolic inclusion,? but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era. ÿ

Villages on Stage examines the contribution of folklore and ethnography to the construction of national identity in post-Soviet Moldova through the development of a new genre of folkloric performance. By highlighting the contribution of villages to the creation of national culture and identity, the standards of authenticity for amateur folkloric ensembles generate an alternative discourse to the State's official, but contentious, promotion of multiethnic policies. At once inclusive and exclusive of the country's multiple ethnic groups, the goals, practices, and ideologies embodied in folkloric performance portray both the local dilemmas of post-socialist nation-building and the shared challenge for folklore and ethnography to participate in public debates about cultural diversity. (Series: Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia - Vol. 26)